


The Beginning and The End

by marianhawkes



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 3
Genre: Action, Adventure, Friendship, Graphic Violence, Hurt/Comfort, LW Is A Long Suffering Science Lesbian, Pretty Much A Novelisation With The Canon Slow-Roasted For Juicy Bits, Slight Canon Divergence, The Good Times And Trauma Caused By Post-Apocalyptia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-05
Updated: 2017-06-28
Packaged: 2018-09-22 04:35:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 23,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9583868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marianhawkes/pseuds/marianhawkes
Summary: Every night, her father told her he was Alpha and Omega. What he didn't tell her was why he had to leave her behind. Thrust into a war-torn post-apocalypse in search of something to fight for, Grace Arlyn opens her eyes and discovers how to stand on her own two feet. What she doesn't expect is for those footprints to mark down history in the Capital Wasteland. War never changes.





	1. The Beginning

_Gray Walls, impenetrable steel._  
_Suffocation! Condemnation!_

* * *

Her childhood was a faded photograph of a life that had passed on long before. She was a baby who giggled at pictures of a smiling sun but would never know the warmth of its rays against her face. Every sunrise was the flickering of fluorescent lights, every gulp of fresh air was filtered through unseen vents. This was her home and it was all she knew. She loved it. She adored Vault 101 with everything in her, finding a strange sort of comfort in the impersonal sterility of the doctor's office that she flitted in and out of, hunching over a book in the corner when the day was slow and tending injured patients with enthusiastic gusto as soon as she was old enough to be trusted with her father's equipment.

She made her place at the front of the classroom, marking her presence with an eager hand shooting to the sky, the hasty scribblings of messy notes soon to be copied in neat, rounded text. Most of what she knew was learned in this room, from mathematics to chemistry, literacy to technology, even tales of the outside and what the world had become. She learned to be reserved and studious, expressing herself with the flourish of a pen and the whirring of machines that she'd taken apart and put back together. The tap-tap-tap of her hammer was the crack of a gunshot; the bold red underlining of titles and key facts was the only spilled blood she knew. This vault was a separate world from the horrors of the outside, yet they played make-believe with games like Radroach Hunter and Find the Raider. The children she played with were rambunctious balls of energy, feverish with curiosity and delight. Their imaginations painted vivid scenes across the grey canvas of their world. Through stories and play, they discovered the feeling of tall grass tickling their feet, the heat of sunlight burning their backs, even the stinging agony of gunshot wounds became so undeniably tangible.

But the door remained closed.

She made inquiries from a very young age, but it wasn't long before she began to recognise the familiar darting of eyes and the restless drumming of hands against tables. Even the biggest gossips on the level would squirm beneath this question's unshifting glare. Every pair of lips were as tightly sealed as the Vault door - that great big hunk of metal would never budge and that was just the way of things. The door would never open. The outside world would never be safe. No one would ever enter the vault and no one would ever leave. Here she was born and here she would die. These facts were agonising in their simplicity, but her aching fascination with what lay beyond soon faded, like an intense headache that throbbed for so long that the steady drumming became almost a comfort.

* * *

_Little hands groping in subterranean uncertainty.  
Mommy? Daddy? Am I Dead?_

* * *

Every night, her father told her he was Alpha and Omega. As a toddler, she would rest her head on his chest and let the strange poem lull her to sleep, too young to find comfort in the verse but old enough to find it in the rise and fall of his chest. After some years passed, she came to recognise the unspoken hope that came with the reading of this passage. She was almost startled to find the same sort of wistfulness in her own voice every time she murmured the prayer, following the religion, morals, footsteps, of her parents. Her mother had believed in the Torah too, she was told. This had been her very favourite quote. Her father told her never to forget it.

_"I am Alpha and Omega. The beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life, freely."_

She never did.

* * *

_Nay! Nay! Reborn into purifying fluorescence!_

_A face emerges, strong and male._

_Father to me? Father to all!_

* * *

With life in the vault came a speedy adolescence, an interminable period of growth and emotion that passed by in flashes of memories. Getting her first Pip-Boy at the proud age of ten, as well as her new vault responsibilities. Applying her first bandage became taking her first blood sample became mending her first broken limb became completing her first basic surgery. Having her radio confiscated by The Overseer when it had picked up some stranger's howling voice. Finding blood in the strangest of places - like her nose when she spent too long on the Reactor Level, like her knuckles when she finally found the courage to punch that bully's stupid face in, like her underwear when her father explained that boys and girls were very different. Sudden flares of energy, anger, self-doubt and lethargy as she searched for her place in this tin can world.

_"You know, having a best friend who knows more about mechanics than make-up is-"_

_"Correct once again, Miss Arlyn! Next week's examination is sure to be a br-"_

_"I'm the Overseer's daughter, so what? Like I get any special-"_

_"I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end."_

While other kids began to spit at their parents' feet, she continued to adore her father with all her heart. She shared with him her greatest goals and ambitions, told him of day-to-day shenanigans or thoughts that had been eaten up her mind from morning to night. She ranted and raved about the ridiculous Tunnel Snake gang that Butch had come up with, griped about how that arrogant peacock and his cronies would grab her best friend Amata in all kinds of unusual places. The birds and the bees had been the most alarming result of that particular conversation.

_"Whatcha gonna do, Gracie, go cry to your daddy?"_

_"Leave her alone, Butch, or I'll go crying to Amata's. Let's see what the Overseer thinks of you and your little club."_

_"It's not a club, Ice Bitch, it's a gang! We're the Tunnel Snakes! Tunnel Snakes rule!"_

The name-calling became more severe just as her classmates did, the youth of Vault 101 growing as harsh and angry as the pimples on their faces. Geek, Nerd, Four-Eyes, all the familiar titles of childhood were washed away with the acid stains of Bitch, Prude, Miss Fucking Perfection. Life became more complicated than she'd ever imagined it would. She was isolated by her love of science, left to wonder why it distanced her from the other girls in her class - who she secretly yet unabashedly respected and admired. She watched other people fall in love all around her, understood the simple formula of Boy + Girl = Undeniable Attraction until one day she didn't understand that at all.

_"I amputated a foot today, Amata - I seriously doubt you're gonna freak me out more than that did."_

_"Okay, okay, it's just... I don't think I like boys. Not like Christie does, you know? I think... I think..."_

_"That you'd rather kiss Christie than any of the boys whose names are all over her journals?"_

_"No, actually, that's- that's the thing. I think I'd rather kiss you."_

On Amata's fifteenth birthday, that was exactly what happened. She'd staged the most spectacular surprise party, invited everyone she knew and bought their silence with the promise of the best birthday cake they'd ever seen. The lights went on, the music swelled and the day was perfect until that stupid robot sliced the cake. They'd been talking at the counter, idle chit-chat forgotten about the instant Andy brought his chainsaw arm down on the delicate confectionery. It happened in a splat of pink frosting and the sudden uproar of good-natured laughter as she and the Birthday Girl were splattered with three layers of icing and sponge. Something must have clicked, snapped, sparked during the precious frosting-dusted seconds before their lips met for a fumbling, dizzying, buttercream-tasting first kiss.

Harsh laughter slashed through that perfect rose-tinted recollection. Tunnel Snakes. Butch. Plastic cups and paper plates being tossed to the tiles. Cheeks flaming, eyes burning, rough hands on her arms, blood roaring in her ears, a voice ripping through her consciousness. The smell of alcohol.

_"Surprise, surprise! Should've known it all along, right, boys?"_

_"So that's why you wouldn't take a ride on the Tunnel Snake. Couldn't take your eyes off Miss Fucking Perfection, huh, Amata?"_

She left the dining hall with a bloodied nose and a girlfriend who spat out promises of vengeance. Together, they devised a genius plan and set to work a week after the party. A few tweaks in the plumbing flooded the bathroom that Butch and Katie were 'meeting up' in. They promised Andy another cake to smash if he floated into the bathroom and took a few snapshots. The next day, he printed off two wonderful polaroids of Butch storming from the bathroom, half dressed, sopping wet with eyes like thunder.

* * *

_Overseeing our lives, our eternities._

_Harshness of discipline, h_ _arshness of love_

_Obedience my saviour!_

* * *

**You are approached by a frenzied Vault scientist who yells: "I am going to put my quantum harmonizer in your photonic resonation chamber!" How do you respond?**

_1\. "But, doctor, wouldn't that cause a parabolic destabilisation of the fission singularity?"_

2\. "Yeah? Up yours too, buddy!"

3\. Say nothing and grab a nearby object to knock the doctor out.

4\. Distract him and slip away before he even knows you are gone.

**While working as a Clinic Intern, a patient stumbles in with strange foot infection that seems to be spreading at an alarming rate. The doctor has stepped out for a while, leaving you on your own. How do you proceed?**

1\. Amputate the foot before the infection spreads.

2\. Scream for help.

_3\. Isolate and medicate to the best of your abilities._

4\. Restrain the patient and observe as the infection spreads.

**You discover a young boy lost in the lower levels of the Vault. He is hungry and frightened - but seems to be in possession of stolen property. What do you do?**

1\. Confiscate the stolen goods and leave the boy behind as punishment.

_2\. Give the boy a hug and tell him everything will be alright._

3\. Pickpocket the stolen property and leave him to his fate.

4\. Lead the boy to safety and turn him in to the Overseer.

**Who is indisputably the single most important resident in Vault 101, he who shelters us from the harshness of the atomic wasteland and to whom we owe everything including our lives?**

1\. The Overseer

2\. The Overseer

_3\. The Overseer_

4\. The Overseer

**Your grandmother invites you to tea, but you're surprised when she hands you a 10mm pistol and orders you to kill another Vault resident. What do you do?**

1\. Obey your elder and kill the resident with the pistol.

2\. Offer your most prized possession for the resident's life.

3\. Ask granny for a minigun instead - you don't want to miss, after all.

_4\. Throw your tea in granny's face._

* * *

_Larva to pupa, pupa to worker._

_Buzz! Buzz! One with the steel honeycomb._

* * *

Turning sixteen was the best thing to ever happen to her. She completed her GOAT exam and was assigned the role of Electrical Maintenance, but it wasn't hard to persuade Brotch the Crotch into giving her the position of Certified Vault Doctor. No way was she letting Abigail Royce succeed her father in that role, not as long as she still drew breath and the Vault door remained shut. While her father trained her, she was given the freedom to study anything she wanted. She worked on the Reactor Level with her father's friend, Jonas, making repairs and keeping everything in check. Some days she just stopped by to say hello. She'd spend hours down there, reading and studying to the sweet music of crackling electricity. Her and Jonas would happily babble to each other about this and that, or just hum along to the radio when the day was dull.

By her seventeenth birthday, she had fully won herself the reputation of a smart and studious girl with a passion for science. She respected her elders, aced every exam, reported serious rule breakages to The Overseer. But in secret, she grew almost as wicked as the Tunnel Snakes, taking poorly-hidden delight in sneaking off from duties to pull pranks and explore the Vault with Amata. She scavenged scrap metal and whatever blueprints she could find, building toasters and radios and other useless contraptions only to take them apart and make them into something else. The therapeutic hobby never grew dull when Amata was with her, painting on a canvas or doodling in a notebook. Aside from the occasional malfunction in the water purifier, life was perfect in Vault 101.

Nothing ever went wrong.

* * *

_Till grey seeps from the walls, to hair, to soul._

_Then, eternal slumber, the sweet sleep of incineration._


	2. S is For Strength!

_"Attention! Please remain calm and stay indoors! The radroach infestation is currently being dealt with! This is no cause for alarm! Please remain calm and stay indoors! The radroach infestation is currently being dealt with! This is no cause for alarm! Please remain calm and stay indoors! The radroach infestation is currently-"_

* * *

"Grace! Grace, wake up! You have to go - now!" 

A voice from far away drained the colour from her dreams and shook her awake. Grace Arlyn cracked her bleary eyes open, getting the vague impression of Amata Almodovar’s spiky outline - a shock of brown hair pulled into a chaotic bun, a triad of moles on one cheek and a splotchy yellow bruise on the other. Grace’s Pip-Boy told her it was only a few minutes past six, but her girlfriend’s eyes were wide and alert, her expression growing more frantic with every second Grace spent tangled in her bedsheets. She sat up, finally feeling the urgency.

"What is it, what’s wrong?" She asked, like the two questions were synonymous.

"You've got to get out of here,” Amata hissed, urging her up and out of bed. One minute, she was pulling her up by the arm, and then she was rummaging through a drawer for a jumpsuit, then she was throwing it into a bewildered Grace’s arms. “I know, I know, this is crazy,” she said, helping Grace with the zip, watching her pull on her boots, still waiting for an explanation to be offered. “Something happened, something bad, you have to go or it’s gonna be too late!”

“Too- what? Amata, just- just calm down, what happened?”

Grace recognised the look on her face - she’d seen it on her father when he was giving a patient bad news. Whatever had happened this morning, it looked like it was terminal.

“It’s your dad. He’s gone, he’s left the Vault, I- I don’t know how, but he made it out.”

All she could do was stand there and wait for her to smile, wait for the sputtery laugh that came before the punchline - Amata was good at keeping a straight face, but soon enough she’d give away the truth and they could both laugh about it together. But for now, she was solemn, mouth drawn in a thin line, eyes dark and grim. Grace could hear her father’s voice in her head, matching the expression.

_“I know how it sounds, Mrs Palmer, but with the right treatment, perhaps…”_

"Jonas is dead, Grace.”

So there was no punchline, only the blow to Grace’s gut and the words that stuck like toffee in her teeth - she wouldn’t believe it, couldn’t, but there wasn’t any arguing with the tears that filled Amata’s eyes, and where were those first few seconds of waking up to warm blankets and her girlfriend’s voice, believing that nothing would ever go wrong?”

“No. No, that’s - no, there’s- there’s been a mistake, he’s-”

“I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.” Amata took her by the hands, trying to shake some kind of understanding out of her. “I know he was your friend, but we don’t have time to figure all this out. Your dad is gone - I don’t know how, I don’t know why, but my father’s men killed Jonas for helping him escape and now they think you’ve got something to do with it. I tried talking to him, I told him you had no idea what was going on, but he’s- he’s gone completely insane, he won’t listen to me. And he isn’t gonna listen to you either. We need to go, get out of here just like James did.”

Grace looked at her like one of them had gone insane. “But you _can’t,_ Amata, you just-”

“No, that’s what they tell you, that’s what they want us to believe, that we’re stuck down here forever. It’s not true. I did some searching through my father’s records; your dad isn’t the only one to get out of here, Grace. We could get out too, both of us.”

“Stop, please, just- just stop!”

Amata grabbed the baseball bat by Grace’s bed and forced it into her hands. “Wake up, Grace. This is real. This is happening. Get your things, and let’s get the hell out of here. We’re leaving Vault 101, we’re finding your dad. And we’re never coming back.”

“Okay,” she breathed. “Okay. Just tell me what to do.”

* * *

 

Home was not as she knew it.

Chaos was holding Vault 101 by the throat. Alarms wailed in a deafening crescendo and a crackly voice boomed that the radroach infestation would be dealt with soon - don’t worry, don’t panic, stay indoors, you’ll be alright. Roaches did scuttle about her feet as she pelted through the never-ending hallways, remembering Amata’s instructions about the Overseer’s emergency tunnel, but it was the armoured guards she was worried about. Security men were crawling all over the place, faces she knew as well as her own protected by riot helmets, defended by police batons. There was nothing she could go but run, shutting out every call for backup, every angry threat, she just had to run, and run, and meet Amata by the exit if the two of them made it there - _but don’t wait for me, Grace. Just run._

Collision.

The force knocked her breathless. She thought she’d be ready to swing her bat, to defend herself against someone she’d smiled at in the hallways nearly every single day. But the boy in front of her wasn’t wearing a riot helmet or a padded vest, just an ugly leather jacket. _Run,_ her instincts told her, _and don’t say goodbye._

But she was rooted to the spot.

"Butch?"

"Grace! Aw, man, it's you! That's great!"

Her brows bumped together in a wary frown. It was one thing that she’d never seen Butch Deloria awake and alert before seven thirty, but something in the nervous shifting of his eyes told her that something wasn’t right. Had Butch been crying?

If her intuition was right, he didn’t act like it. "All that talk about the doc gettin' out, The Overseer goin' crazy, that's all true, ain't it? You really gettin' out of here?"

“I- maybe, I don’t know, I…” She couldn’t figure out what to say except, “What do you want, Butch?”

"Hey, Gracie?" He went on as if he hadn't heard her. "You know I never meant any of that stuff, right? All the screwing around, all the stupid jokes, it was all just fun, right? You know I’d never wanna, you know, mess around with you a serious way, right? Not like that, I mean, you know, we were just screwing around, weren’t we?” 

She realised there were a lot of things she wanted to tell him, especially now that she might never get the chance again. There were names she wanted to call him, maybe even while she was shoving him against the wall and screaming into his face _you bully, you bastard, why tell me all this now?_ But all she did was say, “I need to go, Butch. Tell everybody I said goodbye.” 

"You'll come back, won't ya? When the Overseer cools down, you’ll come back, you’ll put things right, won’t you? ‘Cause I was thinking, maybe - hell, I don’t know. I can’t leave, man, I got my mom to take care of. But if you ever came back again, maybe, you know, you and me, we could-” 

“Tell them I never wanted to leave, tell them I’ll miss them even if they don’t miss me, just- just tell them I’ll come back if I can. If that’s the only thing you ever do for me, just- just do that, okay?” She felt tears welling in her eyes for reasons she couldn’t understand. She’d never had to say goodbye before. “Get inside, keep your mom safe. I have to go.” She said it again, just to make it feel real. “I have to go.” 

“Yeah, yeah, I got it.” Before she knew why he wriggling his jacket off, the thing was thrust into her arms, warm and rough and smelling like too much aftershave. “Keep it, it’s yours. Remember me, won’t ya?” 

With a look of blank disbelief, she slipped one arm into the huge sleeve, then the other, only managing a nod of thanks before she was gone. She pelted through the empty diner and through the opposite door, so far finding herself free of opposition as she headed up the steps to the atrium. A guard was waiting for her. She half-raised her baseball bat, taking a few uncertain steps back as a scurrying of radroaches grabbed the guard's attention. He had half a second to register the presence of Vault 101's Most Wanted before the bloated bugs leaped for his face. 

She didn't waste a second. She shot past him like a whizzing bullet and skidded around a corner, where Stanley from the Maintenance Department was yelling encouragement at Andy the robot, who was roasting a pack of roaches with his flamethrower. They barely even noticed her go by, and so the goodbye was silent, lingering, gone.

* * *

 

The atrium door was just up ahead.

"C'mon, Christie, we can do it, we really can! We're getting out of here just like the doctor!"

"I don't know, Mike. Mr Brotch says it isn't safe out there - hell, _everyone_ says it isn't safe out there! We aren't supposed to leave, they told us that!"

"Forget what they told us! I'm sick of this place, I can't stand it anymore! The guards are at the end of the hall, I'll tell them to let us past, just wait here."

"Be careful!"

Grace waited by the door as Mike strode across towards the hallway. She and Christie shared a worried glance, neither daring to speak. She used to have a crush on this girl, with her shiny red hair and redder lips, always chewing gum and biting pencils and saving her smiles for the prettiest boys in class. None of that was there now. There was only this: the primal fear that came with the upheaval of your entire world, the grasping of hands that locked together in silent solidarity, and the gunshot that killed Mike Lopez.

The worst part was the fall. There was the noise, ringing, concussive, and the way his body jerked and danced until his legs could not longer carry him, and there was the way the guards just took up their positions down the hall again, not caring about the boy who knew so much about pre-war poetry but pretended to like guns and girls instead. They didn’t care about his sister, screaming out his name and breaking down in tears. It was only when Grace tried to wrestle her hysteria down and calm her that the guards took notice, and all she could do was run far away, wondering whether she’d left an innocent girl to die, wondering if she or Amata would be next, wondering if things had always been this bad and she’d been too blind to notice it. She searched frantically for answers as she sped through the corridor, but all she found was the sign above her head.

HARD WORK IS HAPPY WORK.

* * *

 "I'm telling you, I don't know anything!"

Grace’s breath hitched in her throat as she followed the sound of Amata’s voice. There was a ringing _slap_ and a cry of pain. More pleading. “She’s my friend, I was worried about her! What does she have to do with any of this anyway?!” Grace edged just close enough to the door so that she could hear everything that was going on behind it.

"Amata, don't make me keep this up," The Overseer warned. "Officer Mack may enjoy this, but I certainly don't. We just want to find your friend so we can talk to her, make sure she doesn't do anything drastic, you know how she is."

"I told you, I don't know where she is. Daddy, I promise!"

Another hard slap and Grace slammed her fist on the button, a solemn and final _no_ to everything this man had to done to them. Officer Mack spun around, reaching for his belt - was that a gun, baton, can of mace? Grace smacked him across the head with her baseball bat before she could find out. She waited for him to stagger, cry out, fight back, but all he did was say _“huh?”_ and crumple at her feet.

"Assaulting an officer," The Overseer tutted. "And here I thought you’d be a good influence on Amata.” Grace forced herself to meet his unflinching stare, eyes darting for a moment towards Amata, who was slowly edging away from her father. "I hope you're here to turn yourself in. You're already in enough trouble as it is - don't make it worse for yourself."

"What are you _talking_ about?" Her voice was small with fear. “I didn’t _do_ anything!”

“Daddy, she’s telling the truth,” Amata added, gingerly touching the raw handprint across her face. “Please, just listen to her.”

“How could you do that to her?” Grace asked, searching his eyes for any shred of compassion, but he refused to look straight at her. “How could you just stand there and let her get hurt?”

"I place the good of the Vault above everything, even my own paternal feelings. We must not allow sentiment to cloud our judgement! Throwing down that weapon and handing yourself in is the only way to ensure her safety, as well as your own. Go on, that's a good girl. Just set it right there - good. Always such a good kid, weren’t you?” He sneered.  “You wouldn’t stand a chance out there, even if you could get out."

She searched for something bold to say, something heroic, but her steely one-liner came out sounding like “You killed Jonas. You killed my friend.”

"A regrettable incident, but desperate times, I'm afraid. Everything I did, I did for the Vault, to keep you safe, to keep all of you safe - and your father was happy to endanger us all by opening that door. I should have known you’d end him just like him, never minding his own business, convinced he knows what’s best for us all, the good doctor and his annoying little brat who just can’t help bringing harm to everybody around her.”

“You think this is our fault?!” She raged, trying so hard to sound brave though her voice was shaking. “You got one of my best friends killed! There are kids dying out there because of you and you’re just letting it happen! Maybe my father is a traitor and maybe he was acting crazy, but you’re a murderer and a bully and and- and an asshole.”

“Grace, don’t,” Amata hissed, looking remarkably like a bomb disposal person trying to choose which wire to cut.

“Watch yourself, young lady, you’re just digging yourself deeper and-”

“Oh, don’t pretend like there’s any way out of this!” She shouted. “You aren’t just going to let me go, you didn’t send your men out to hunt me down just to- just to tell me off like I’ve been cutting class or- or missing duties! Please, just- just let me out of here.” It was that simple just to say it, the words she’d been tossing around in her head her entire life. “Just let me go. I promise, I’ll never come back. Please.”

"You think you can stand there in your position and _demand_ me to let you go, break out Vault’s most important rule?  If you so badly want to die like your dear father, Miss Arlyn, I'll be happy to assist you. You won't even need to go through the trouble of opening the door."

“Stop!” Amata begged. “Daddy, what are you- no, Grace, wait, stop!”

Grace pulled the gun from her belt and aimed it at the Overseer’s head. It suddenly became far too impossible to believe that this wasn’t a nightmare. Far off in the distance, Amata begged for her to put the gun down. A little further away, her father roamed the wasteland in search of something more important than his daughter. Even further than that, a small voice in the back of her mind told her this wasn’t the only way.

Right here, right in front of her, the Overseer called for the guards and she shot him.

The gunshot _clapped_ in her ears, impossibly loud. It rang out with all the certainty and undeniability of the corpse that landed on the floor in front of her. She couldn’t see his face, wouldn’t look, couldn’t - there was nothing left of him but one hand that feebly twitched and the _blood_ , the blood that spattered her shoes and stained the face of the gaping girl behind him - “Amata, I- I didn’t, I didn’t-” but then she was crouching down beside him trying to shake the corpse to life, frantic hands, gaping wound, nothing but empty eyes staring, and staring. She gulped down a breath, the corpse blurring in her tear-stained vision. Her head was spinning, this wasn’t real, this wasn’t _right_ , she’d just killed the Overseer, she’d just killed her best friend’s father.

“No, no, daddy, please, _dad!”_ Amata’s voice trembled, hands coming back bloody as she gave her father a final urgent shake. When she looked up at Grace, her eyes snapped open like the wound on her father’s skull, bloody and raw, bloody and raw. “You- oh my God, you killed him, how-? How could you kill him? He was my dad!”

“I didn’t want- I- no, I- I just-”

"I was just trying to _help_ you! I saved your life, I tried to- I tried to help you get away from him and you killed him!” Her voice was shrill with panic, grief, anger, white-hot, bouncing off the walls. It was like they didn’t know each other, like they hadn’t been best friends since they were little kids, sneaking around the lower levels, defending each other from radroaches and playing games until their feet could barely carry them. It was like they’d never been splatted with birthday cake and had their first fumbling kiss in front of everyone at the party, like they’d never fallen asleep together in the knowing darkness after Christie’s Halloween party, waking up in a tangle of hair and limbs and cheap costume fabric. They’d promised to love each other in secret and silence if genetically adequate male partners ever got in the way, and they’d promised to be bold and resolute - forget the rules, forget anyone else, their love would be miles underground where nobody could touch it, where no one could try to take it away.

All of that, and they were strangers when they spoke again.

"The password to my father's terminal is Amata. Now go."

"Amata-"

"Get out, Grace! I hope you make it out there, I really do. I hope you never find out what it's like to have your father die right in front of you. But I never want to see your face again, I never want you to come back here ever again. I'm calling the guards in two minutes. Don’t turn back.”

* * *

 The corpse Grace Arlyn cried for that day was not one she had created herself.

She rushed for the body and crouched beside it, letting herself sob, letting anger and hopelessness wage war in her throat. Her old friend’s face was badly bruised, his head lolling to one side as his eyes stared emptily above. It wasn’t fair. Jonas had been so good, her father’s best friend and her favourite pair of listening ears, her favourite tone deaf whistling and terrible jokes about radroaches and reactors. All that, gone for nothing. Her apologies were drowned out by the crackling electricity, but she said them over and over again as if somehow he’d hear.

When she reached for his hand, she found something square and plastic held inside it. Blinking away tears, she pried his grip loose and flinched away at the clammy coldness of his skin. A cold dread nestled in her stomach when she saw the words _note from dad_ written in a familiar scrawl across the tape. She wordlessly slotted it inside her Pip-Boy, dreading the answers her father might have left for her, dreading the words he may have left unsaid. But they could wait.

She had to go.

* * *

 The Vault was like a creature in slumber, waking itself with a groan and a hiss as she slammed her fist down on the control panel. A walkway trundled out in front of her, leading impossibly to the fabled door that never opened. And here it was, right in front of her, opening. She felt so strangely calm, disquieted, as if there were no alarms blaring overhead, as if that wasn’t _sunlight_ beaming in from the feeble wooden door that lay through the tunnel beyond, all rock and moss, nothing she’d ever seen before or felt beneath her feet - until now.

This was the childhood fantasy she’d already half-forgotten. This was all those dreams about the sun on her back and fresh air all around her, a world without low ceilings and prepackaged food and the same songs on the radio that she’d heard a thousand times. This was the answers she’d once pleaded for, the truth about up above. This was the promise of hope and freedom and a world so much bigger than she’d ever had the chance to know. This was her life. This was impossible. This was a dream. This was real. It was real, it was real, it was everything that could ever matter and she wouldn’t look back.

Grace Arlyn pushed the door open and left Vault 101.


	3. P is For Perception!

_"I don't really know how to tell you this. I hope you'll understand, but I know you might be angry. I thought about it for a long time, but in the end I decided it was best for you not to know. So many things could have gone wrong, and there's really no telling how The Overseer will react when he finds out. It's best if he can blame everything on me. Obviously, you already know that I'm gone. It was something I needed to do. You're nearly an adult now. Soon you’ll be ready to be on your own. Maybe some day things will change and we can see each other again, but I don't want you to follow me. God knows life in the Vault isn't perfect, but at least you'll be safe. Just knowing that will be enough to keep me going. Be good, Gracie. Be the best damn doctor in that Vault, can you do that for me? I don't have much time, Grace. I hope you can forgive me for this, some day._

_Goodbye. I love you."_

* * *

She stumbled into the piercing light, shielding her eyes from the burning horizon. Her legs wobbled beneath her; black spots danced across her vision, stinging her eyes. The ground cracked and crunched beneath her, the terrain sloping and uneven beneath her unsteady feet. A tall, blackened, twisted _thing_ stood to her left, rough against her palm as she leaned against it for support. After taking a gulp of metallic air she pressed on, finding her way to the edge of the cliff. Her vision cleared. Her legs buckled. She fell to her knees and looked out at the bleak horizon that stared so indifferently back at her, and she knew that she'd been wrong all along.

There was nothing left.

It was as if the world had been swept away by a colossal flood, leaving only crumbling buildings and war-tossed destruction in its wake. The barren land had swallowed up parts of the road and every path was littered with burnt-out vehicles or their abandoned parts. The disfigured silhouettes that burned through the colourless horizon were barely recognisable as trees, as thin and brittle as charred old toothpicks. She choked down the dust and forced herself to look out into the abyss, at the collapsing devastation left behind. Towering buildings cut through the skyline like a row of jagged teeth in a mouth that was ready to clamp down and swallow her whole.

For a while, she just stared and stared and stared, replaying the holotape until she knew it by memory, trying to find some truth in it, some clues, anything. But there was nothing. Her father had left her with nothing. She’d lived her entire life believing that James Arlyn would always leave footsteps for her to follow, but either he’d covered his tracks well, or the wasteland was concealing them with dust and decay. All she could do was stand up, breathe deeply, follow the past her dad had surely taken, which sloped downwards from the cliff and led her past a creaking water tower, low and squat and stained with rust. Even walking in this place was like a treacherous game of hide and seek where every creaking building could keep a monster disguised.

_What are you looking for out here, Dad? What could you possibly find?_

A faded billboard leaned perilously against a partially collapsed building. Without her glasses, she could only make out the largest word. SPRINGVALE. It must have been a town of some sort, but everything that might have once made it beautiful had long since been blown away by the bombs. Most of the houses were frozen in a state of mid-collapse, the windows smashed or the roofs caved in, and their doors were boarded shut. Some of them didn't even have doors to boast of, reduced to little more than smoked-out shells.

But there was something beautiful about this place, despite all it had lost. The sun was climbing over the rocky horizon, and the tears that streamed down Grace's cheeks were no longer from the stinging pain that the light brought. She stopped in her tracks. The world fell to a hush. The wasteland held its breath and watched the smile blossom across her face, watched the awe light up in her eyes as she scurried back for a better view. She covered her grin to suppress the squeak that burst from her lips, something that was half a laugh, half a sob. It was the sound of grief-stricken joy from the mouth of a girl who never should have seen this sunrise, who never should have seen the glowing trail across her warm brown skin as she raised her hands to the sky and felt the growing heat. She thought her breathless excitement would last forever, and a sign in the distance only strengthened that assurance.

WELCOME TO SPRINGVALE ELEMENTARY!

She ran, and forgot to feel afraid. There was something wonderfully dizzying about the breeze that streamed through her hair, the heat that blazed on her face, the sound of concrete beneath her feet - not steel, never steel, not again. The school looked like a pumpkin with its topped sliced off and its insides scooped out, but what remained of the structure seemed strong enough that it wouldn’t fall on top of her when she went inside. The walls were caked with dirt and wiry brambles choked away any hope of grass, but it was something. In a world where everything had died, that would be enough.

She pushed open the door.

Her stomach lurched. Her breath caught in her throat. Her hand grasped for purchase on the door frame as her legs swayed beneath her because God- _God,_ this was- this couldn’t- her intestines writhed and hot tears pricked her eyes because this wasn't real, this wasn't real, this was _impossible_ and she’d known there wouldn’t be beauty here, she’d known there wouldn’t be life but this was worse than that. This would be unfathomable if it wasn’t staring her in the face. She wasn’t ready for this. Her father had never been anything but a bare-faced liar. He hadn't told her about this, hadn't told her about anything and had everyone in Vault 101 been nothing but a goddamn liar, swearing that there was nothing left but really there _was_ and what was left was-

\- a bloodbath.

Two corpses were mounted on the wall, their shadows brought to life by the fluorescent light that flickered and flashed. Her breaths grew sharp and shallow as she forced herself to look at the bodies, both spread-eagle and nailed horizontally, one beneath the other. They had both been decapitated. Thick clots of blood stuck to the wall in clumps and had congealed around the stumps of their necks. Looking past the rusted metal cage beside her, she found another body suspended from the ceiling, hooks lodged in the dead woman’s ankles, one more skewered through her neck and protruding from her gaping mouth.

Grace’s stomach heaved. She covered her face with Butch’s jacket to fight away the smell of decomposition, but she couldn’t stop herself throwing up only a few feet from the bones scattered across the floor of the cage. Small, fragile bones.

Gunshot.

She dropped to her stomach. The shot swelled in her ears. Her heart pounded in her throat as she scurried for cover behind a wall. Footsteps. She sank down, gun held in tremulous hands as she peered around the corner, There was nothing but a doorway and a man. Their eyes met. Grace swallowed a sob. His cleaver glinted prettily against the flickering light. She watched, voiceless with terror as the stranger drew closer - a grin full of too many teeth. His voice grated her skin when he spoke.

"You one of those stray little birdies, sweetheart? All grown up and flyin' away from home?"

"I- I need help," she stammered. "Please, I- I'm just trying to find my dad."

"Runaway daddy, huh? Ain't that just precious?" He extended a hand to her. "Could be I might've saw 'im before. Might've wandered in here, huh?"

She took his hand and let him haul her to her feet. "His- his name is James Arlyn, he's in his late forties, greying hair, a jumpsuit like mine. He- he came from the Vault, Vault 101, it isn't far from here, you might've seen him."

“Maybe I did," he smiled. For a moment, just a moment, she knew she’d be fine. And then he was holding his cleaver against her throat. He was right behind her, pulling back a fistful of her hair and drawing a terrified squeak from her throat. “Maybe he dandered in here and I bled him like a mole rat, huh? Want me to do the same thing to you, little bird?”

She pressed the barrel of the gun against his stomach. His cleaver swung high.

Her finger jerked.

He staggered back. The cleaver dropped with a clang. It seemed like he should have been screaming, groaning, doing _something_ , but all he did was grunt something that sounded like “Gah!” and then he was writhing on the floor.

"I- I'm so sorry!" She stammered, scooting back against the bars of the cage. She shoved the pistol into her pocket. Things like _pain-induced delirium, unsanitized medical equipment_ and _hypovolemic shock_ danced around her brain as she scurried away from the curse-spitting stranger. As she babbled apologies, drool spilled from the screaming man's mouth, pooling with the thick, dark blood that spilled from his stomach. As much as she babbled apologies and begged for forgiveness, the stranger would only respond with the hysterical promise that he would send her back to her shiny little Vault piece by piece and do repulsive things to her mother.

When he grabbed her wrist, she grabbed her gun.

Three concussive shots sounded. His grip loosened and fell away. She backed against the door, seeing the stranger fall dead, seeing the Overseer’s body twitch, seeing Jonas stare up and up and ceiling, glasses cracked, blood trickling from his mouth. Her grasping hand found the doorway and she ran. Her life became a maze of hallways. Her boots slammed against the rotten wood as she searched frantically for an exit, shouts rising all around her as the school dwellers caught her scent. Bodies were suspended almost angelically from every room she passed. She shot past rooms full of busted terminals and scattered desks. She bolted through a kitchen with blood-soaked towels piled up in the sink and a body sprawled out on the countertop, still twitching. She bolted through a hallway full of metal lockers and-

\- skidded to a halt.

Her eyes darted up and down the corridor. The footsteps around her grew louder with every ragged breath. No time to react - _think fast, Grace_. She slid her backpack towards the end of the hallway. It slumped against the wall as if she'd abandoned it before turning the corner. She wrenched the nearest locker open, cringing away from the sharp metal shriek. It was beautifully, blessedly empty, and big enough for her tiny body to stand in upright. So she did, shutting it tight and holding her breath as darkness swallowed her vision. Her sight was limited to the three thin vents right in front of her eyes. If she just kept quiet, if she just held her breath, if she just held back her scream as the raiders pelted down the corridor after her.

One of them lingered.

She glided past the locker like some sort of angel, white hair tumbling down her back in grease-slick tangles. Her leather armour was dyed black and cut to strips at the arms, her skin so pale it almost glowed beneath the dying light above, highlighting every cut and bruise. Her eyes were large and featureless, glazed over by a milky shade of white. She was blind, but her movements suggested otherwise. She craned her neck to stare into the light above, before her head snapped in Grace’s direction. She squeezed her eyes shut. The silence was sliced through by the sound of a blade against metal.

_"I hear your heartbeat, little angel... you aren't like the rest, but they'll hurt you anyway, oh, they will... always do..."_

Her whispers grew louder with every echoing step.

_"Hurt me too, took me from the nice place... took me from the church, took me from the bomb... the bomb took my trees, it ate my eyes... They bite, you know, oh, they bite... They let you run away but then they get you... always get you... always make you bleed... nothing you can do out here but bleed!”_

Her knife skewered through the locker and cut a sliver of light through the darkness. The tip planting a cold kiss on her throat before the raider twisted it back. Grace screamed as the next blow came, grazing her arm before she could grab her gun. The next blow missed her eye by millimetres. She gathered her courage and kicked the door open. The raider jumped back, giving her a few precious seconds to side-step the following blow. Grace reached for the backpack that wasn’t there.

"Don't make me kill you," Grace pleaded, raising her gun half-heartedly at the blind woman.

But she lunged again and Grace killed her.

There was no time to react to the third corpse she'd made today, no time to even think as she pelted down the hall and retrieved her bag. An icy hand clutched at her heart. She had no way to tell where the others had gone, no way to tell which direction would lead her out. So she hurtled right, towards another rusted cage installed in the crumbling wall. She stumbled dazedly back from the cell full of bones, legs locked in place until her eyes found the open door to her right.

It was a classroom. And for a moment, it was hers.

* * *

  _"This fuckin' know-it-all's gettin' on my nerves!"_

_"Alright, class, time to hand in your projects."_

_"If that smiley bitch puts her hand up one more time I'm gonna break it."_

_"You must be following in your father's footsteps, Miss Arlyn, hm?”_

_"Between you and me, Grace, the whole thing's a joke. I'll put you down for Vault Doctor and tell Miss Royce that we made a mistake."_

_"Garbage Burner? Are you fucking kidding me?! No way, man, you're a fuckin' joke, this whole thing's a fucking joke!"_

_"Look, Grace, you're a smart kid, so I'll tell it to you straight. This Vault's survived for over two hundred years because the youth of today are capable of turning handles and pressing buttons. We wake up every day, do our goddamn jobs to keep the lights on and the water running, and we do that so the youth of tomorrow survive to turn more handles and press more buttons. It's a joke. It's pointless."_

_"It's pointless! It's fucking pointless! You can't tell the Tunnel Snakes what to do! Tunnel Snakes rule!"_

_"It isn't pointless. This place means something! It keeps us alive, it keeps us safe. It's home, Mr Brotch. That has to mean something."_

* * *

 She took a hopeful step towards it and the vice clamped down.

She was lifted off her feet. The raider wrenched her arms behind her back and threw her into the room. The ground rushed up to meet her. The classroom door was slammed shut. Something warm trickled over her eye. Her vision swam. When she touched her fingers to her temple, they came back glistening red. A shadow was looming above her, face cracked apart by a wide yellow smile. She scurried back from the approaching figure until her back hit a stack of upturned desks. She spotted her pistol lying by the cell bars, too far away to reach. She looked up at the smiling raider with pleading eyes, and she saw the pool cue in his hands, and she saw the skeletons scattered behind him, and she saw her father's face as he wished her goodnight, and she knew that she was going to die.

But not yet.

She grabbed the legs of the nearest chair and hurled it with all her might. The raider stumbled and cried out. She reached for another, threw it, silencing his threats. Footsteps shuddered along the corridor. Grace reached for her baseball bat and climbed to her feet, swerving around to meet the oncoming raiders. A man and a woman. A pool cue and a pistol. She swung her bat in a wide upward arc, knocking the gun out of the woman's hand before slamming the bat down on her skull with a sharp _crack._

She raised her bat for one final blow to the remaining raider, but he beat her to the punch. He slammed her against the wall and held her there by the throat, dropping his weapon and using both hands to squeeze her neck with an intensity that crushed. His skin was bursting with muscle, his eyes wide with manic delight as he lifted her effortlessly off the ground. She struggled and squirmed and fought for breath, but her airways were clamped shut and her vision was growing dark. Tears streamed down her cheeks as she raked at the raider's eyes, tried to push her thumbs into his eye sockets and slam her fists against his head. Coloured spots danced across her vision.

* * *

  _"It's alright, Gracie, you're safe now. No more nightmares, shh, that's it. Daddy's got you."_

_"Keep acing these tests, Miss Arlyn, and we'll have to move you up a grade."_

_"It's okay, see? Just a little cut, it's alright. Good thing Daddy's a doctor - he knows just the kiss to make it better."_

_"What are you looking at? Stop gawking and get back to work! Selfish and insubordinate, just like your father!"_

_"Just because I'm The Overseer's daughter, so what? Like I get any special treatment? My dad hates me just as much as he hates everyone else."_

_"Don't give me that - you were drunk, all of you! What if The Overseer had walked in instead of me, did you think about that?!"_

" _Alright, it's time we had a little talk. See, boys and girls have different parts..."_

* * *

 She slammed her foot into the raider's groin. He howled in agony, loosening his grip enough for her to force him off her and push him to the ground. She fell back against the wall, gulping down air and grabbing her bat from the floor. She didn't dare sob, didn't dare scream or cry or wish for home again. The pain in her throat was like fire, consuming every thought in her head.

She gathered all the fear, all the anger and hatred and confusion, and she pushed it into her body, into her arms, her fists. And when the raider got to his feet again, she swung the bat with everything in her and knocked his head right out of the park.

_“Don’t know why I left the homestead, I really must confess.”_

The road ended past Springvale Elementary, bringing her to an empty playground filled with more garbage than games. A chalked-out hopscotch had miraculously survived, but the rusted slide and creaking round-about were just about ready to fall. She spent a while just wandering, waiting - for what, she didn’t know - just sitting on the collapsing old swing set and looking out at the lake beyond, wondering how long it would take for the bruises on her neck to fade away. She gazed out at the horizon, broken and bleak, and decided that north was as good a direction to go as any.

_“I’m a weary exile, singing my song of loneliness.”_

So she set off, rendered mute by a stranger's hand around her throat, too exhausted to weep for the scattered remnants of the Old World. Tears streamed down her face but she was silent, alone, and the jacket she hugged around her body wasn't enough to bring her warmth. What carried her forward was the thought of home, of her father, and the picture she clutched so tightly in her hands, scared that she would lose it to the growling wind. It was luck that she’d dumped it in her bag in the frenzy to escape - but luck, she figured, was long gone by now.

_“The pals are the readiest, the gals are the steadiest.”_

She wished it was a more recent picture. Her father only looked younger if you squinted; it was hard to see past the smile that wrinkled his eyes and lips, but his hair had only been lightly touched by grey back then, where now it ran straight through. Next to him was a tiny ten year-old girl smiling at her father’s side, a girl who had never been beaten up or blood-splattered, who had never held a gun or used one, who still believed in doors that never opened and lives that never changed.

_“The love the liveliest, the life the loveliest, way back home.”_

When the sun began to set on the ruined horizon, Grace Arlyn set off to find her father. 

_“No place like home sweet home.”_


	4. E is for Endurance!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> content warning: sexual abuse, graphic violence.

_ "We live in an age of poverty, greed, violence, destruction. Indeed, the very seat of the federal government, Washington D.C, has been reduced to what is now known as The Capital Wasteland. How did it come to this, sweet America? How did our leaders allow the most powerful nation on Earth to die?" _

* * *

 

Grace Arlyn was covered in somebody else's blood. The sun was hot against her back as she headed across the beaten road, but there was a cold in her, a bitter chill that craawled through her veins. It was nestling in her stomach and climbing up her throat. She swore to herself that after one more step, she could rest. One more step and she could fall. One more step and she could cry, at least, and run if her body would let her, retrace every step until she was safe at the mouth of her Vault again, safe in the promises of home. She swore to herself that after one more step, she could pound against that metal door until her knuckles bled and her legs gave out.

She couldn't go on. But she did.

The road sloped ever onwards, an interminable stretch of dusty asphalt that cut through the glowing horizon, accompanied only by a passing Eye-Bot that drifted alongside her. Small, round, and hovering about five feet from the air, the robot was singing the same happy tune that was currently playing on her Pip-Boy radio. This was the third of its kind that she'd come across so far, but still she found herself endeared by the adorable contraption. The model was as strange and unfamiliar as the messages it broadcast from its speakers. She'd only heard a couple of fragments so far, but the so-called Enclave Radio featured a feverishly patriotic man who seemed to talk about nothing but democracy, the future, and the tragedy of America's destruction. Although the information was interesting and the tunes fairly catchy, she had a feeling that this stranger didn’t represent the majority of whoever the hell was living out here. She hoped she’d pick up a better signal soon. 

After another few minutes of listening to wordless music and staring with fascination at the trees and lampposts she passed by, the road sloped upwards and branched off in three directions. She'd walked straight into what looked like an abandoned town, made up of dingy white-washed buildings. A billboard stood atop a squat structure to her left, advertising the safe and sound utopia of her local Vault. She felt a pang in her chest as she turned off the radio and headed down the quiet street. There was some kind of makeshift blockade up ahead, but she couldn't see anybody around. A faded sign on the nearest wall read  _ Fairfax Ruins,  _ so she added the marker to her Pip-Boy map and labelled it accordingly.

That was when she fell through the ground.

The concrete smashed against her skull. The cut on her arm ripped open. Her chin slammed off the ground and her teeth sliced through her tongue. Her entire body sang with pain as she struggled to her feet. When she looked up, scraping her hair away from her face, she found that the sky was little more than a person-sized rectangle far above her. Birds the size of pencil points swooped by only to be out of sight in a second. The piercing blue made her eyes water. By pressing herself against the far wall and stretching on her tiptoes, she could almost see the mechanism at the uppermost part of the opposite wall.

It was a trap door. She'd fallen through an actual trap door.

She almost laughed, but the oncoming voices silenced her. She could barely make out the conversation, but she could pinpoint some familiar words from back in Springvale Elementary.  _ Fresh meat, little birdie, bleeder.  _ She scrambled into a corner, grabbing her gun and holding it tight. But when she turned her head just slightly to the wall behind her, she saw that it had a handle. She saw that it was a  _ door.  _ She shoved it open and slammed it behind her, stumbling into what looked like an old storage room. A couple of first-aid kits were stacked on a wide table in front of her, and an empty shelf stood by the door, with a dented old garbage can next to it.

She didn't have time to waste. She knocked the garbage can aside, letting it fall with a hollow  _ clang  _ at her feet before tightening her hands around the bars of the shelf. It resisted her pulling with a sharp squeal of metal, protesting so angrily that she had no choice but to head to the other side and shove. A little more progress. A little more force. A little less time to waste as she heard the echoing of footsteps from somewhere unseen. The screwed her eyes shut and gave one last push. The shelf fell forward, blocking the door completely. Grace allowed herself a silent cheer as she went rooting through the crates on the occupied shelves. She found stacks and stacks of ammo inside, and for a moment, she was almost delighted. She knew that a cartridge - or round - contained a bullet, a cartridge case, gunpowder and a primer. She knew that a bullet was the thing that shot through the barrel towards the target at approximately two-thousand-five-hundred feet per second. But she had no idea which bullets were the right ones, not without experimenting to see which cartridges would fit her pistol. She decided to open her backpack and throw in as much as she could fit.

_ "Alright, who is that?!" _

As she emptied the first-aid kits into her bag, something gave a mechanical screech. Two panels on the floor lifted and shrunk back to reveal a metal staircase beneath. Grace shrank down behind the shelves, fumbling with her pistol. She remembered reloading her BB gun back home - why should this one be different? She tried to pull back the lever. Where  _ was _ it? The bullets went in from the bottom, didn't they? She looked at the bottom, uselessly trying to pull it downwards. Nothing. Footsteps. Seconds left to reload this stupid gun before whoever was climbing those steps came up here and killed her. Two seconds to cock the gun ineffectively. One second to find the magazine release and watch the empty magazine clatter to the floor. 

Out of time.

A hand clamped around her hair and dragged her upwards. Grace shrieked as her thrashing legs were lifted into the air. She threw her weight against her captor and sent him stumbling back against the wall. When the raider tried to cover Grace's mouth with his hand, she sank her teeth into him, making a guttural sound like some rabid dog as he tossed her against one of the shelves. There was a flash of sharp teeth and sunken eyes.

A tire iron smacked across her face. She scurried back in time for the raider to plant a hard kick on her jaw. Her head slammed back against the shelf. Stars exploded behind her eyes. She was hauled to her feet again, barely conscious as the raider held her against the wall. She screwed her eyes shut, and for a moment her world was nothing more than the raider's heaving breaths, his hands around her waist, his voice in her ear.

"Slicer told me that little trap up there wouldn't do any good. Oh, man, was he wrong."

She cringed back as the raider dragged his tongue from her jaw to her cheek, tightening his grip around her body as she struggled.

"God, look at those teeth. You a little Vault Bird, huh? Damn, always wanted one of those.”

He pressed his lips against hers. She pounded her fists against his chest. He bit her lip. She kicked his shins. He spun her around and sent her crashing to the ground. She screamed and begged in words that pooled like blood in her mouth. The raider advanced, pinning her down with one hand. His face was shattered by a smile that never reached his eyes. Cracked lips pressed against her skin. He searched for the zip on her jumpsuit. She searched for a weapon. 

They found what they were looking for.

He pulled her onto his lap and tugged down her zip, exposing her skin to the cool air. She swallowed her fear and returned his kisses, fighting her body's desperate urge to recoil at every touch of his hands as he pulled down her jumpsuit. He stiffened against her. Her hand tightened around the weapon as his belt.

Her attacker's eyes widened as the knife glinted above him. Half a hundred thoughts flickered across his face in a dying spectrum. He made a jerky move towards her and she plunged the knife down. The raider writhed and twitched beneath her as she carved a chasm across his throat. A wordless scream of guilt and grief echoed off the walls as her skin was drenched in blood, as the raider thrashed hopelessly on the floor, as a bubbling pool of crimson smothered his final breath. She pulled the knife out and threw it aside, and a stranger died beneath her. 

She gulped down a breath and tore herself away from the body, her back knocking against the shelf behind her. No time to panic, no time to think about how no one would want her home after this, no time to think about what her dad would say -  _ look what you’ve done, sweetheart -  _ no time to do anything but zip her jumpsuit, choke down another breath and leave before the body became too real to bear. The tunnel rang with the clashes of her footsteps as she raced down its steep metal throat. She ran until she found a staircase, one that looked too much like a way out. Then there was nothing but an arc-light helmet and a flamethrower as a leather-clad figure emerged from the door to her left.

She made a break for it. There was a fatal  _ click  _ as gas sparked behind her. Flames licked her back, leaving a searing trail. She toppled, chin bouncing off the floor, but still she crawled. She turned her prone body around to face her attacker, to stare with steely eyes into the sinister glint of the helmet's screen.

The flamer revved and she dropped, driving her knife through the raider’s ankle. The huge weapon clattered to the ground  as text book diagrams flashed across her vision. The tibia, the fibula and the calcaneus were all parts of the ankle. The three major ligaments were posterior talo-fibular, the anterior talo-fibular, and the calcaneo-fibular. The raider dropped in squirming agony as she sawed through his Achilles tendon with surgical concentration. Teeth gritted, heart thumping - she was past stopping now, blood spraying her face, a raider screaming beneath her, nothing but ligaments and flesh - goodbye, calcaneal tendon, goodbye, any hope of going home. The raider’s foot separated from his body with all the calm finality of a much awaited divorce. 

It wasn’t enough.

She got to her feet and reached for his weapon. In her hands, the flamer was just another machine eager to follow her commands. She pulled back the trigger. Flames flickered in her eyes as the screeching man’s flesh peeled off in bloody strips like long, wet rags. The skin on his face rolled back from his lips and forced a burning grin from him. His body seized violently. His eyes turned to jelly and disappeared into his skull. 

That was when she dropped the flamer and headed up the steps into daylight.


	5. C is for Charisma!

_ "How did it come to this, America? How did your leaders allow the most powerful nation on Earth to die? The answer is really quite simple: Incompetence. Incompetence at the highest echelons of power. We put our trust, our faith, in halfwits. Our intrepid leaders had everything they wanted! Power. Wealth. Prestige. And it made them lazy, America. Oh yes, and laziness breeds stupidity." _

* * *

 

Grace Arlyn knew that there were three different types of cloud. Cumulus, Stratus, Cirrus. Cumulus, Stratus, Cirrus. Cumulus, Stratus, Cirrus. She also knew how clouds were formed. She knew that sunlight warms the water's surface, evaporating the water and forming a warm layer above it. The rising air currents organise themselves into thermals, and these rising parcels of water vapour rise to form clouds. She'd done a surprise test on clouds when she was nine. She'd once made a cloud inside a glass jar using some ice cubes, boiling water and a can of her father's deodorant. When she was sixteen, she'd blown clouds of hazy smoke up towards the ceiling, the sound of giddy laughter shuddering in the air. She took a hopeless sort of comfort in these memories as the storm began to gather overhead, casting a sickly green glow across the wasteland. It spread like a cancer across the horizon until she could feel its growing violence in her bones. 

With an almighty  _ crack  _ that shook the ground beneath her, the rumbling sky came alive with thundering ferocity. Rain hammered against the earth; jagged forks of white-green lightning pierced the horizon like knives. Her body was surging with ecstasy as she raised her face to the sky and opened her body to the storm. Breathless, she shook out her hair and reached towards the quaking sky. Icy droplets kissed her skin and shook her back to life, enveloping her in a freezing rush of adrenaline. She almost skipped along the glistening road as she remembered every night spent dreaming about this moment, about every ice-cold shower taken with closed eyes as she imagined the rush of rainfall down her spine. She raced headlong through the rain until a hazy blur of buildings became visible in the distance. As she headed towards it, she found a sign that stood out against the blurry sheet of rain.

**_WELCOME TO CARRINGTON - ENJOY YOUR STAY!_ **

The town was alive with activity, despite the impending nightfall and pouring rain. It was spread across a short stretch of wasteland like a shoddily stitched blanket, pulled together from both pre-war and post-apocalyptic thread. Some buildings were similar to the ones she'd seen back in Springvale, made from crumbly brick and partially collapsed roofs, some surrounded by crooked picket fences. Others seemed to have been built more recently, made entirely from scrap metal and wood. By the time she reached the entrance to the town, the rain had died down enough to allow a better view of the people who lived in it. Most wore ragtag pieces of clothing that she supposed must have been scavenged - button-down shirts, leather coats, ratty jeans and an assortment of different patched-up hats were visible among the gathering crowd. Others were more heavily armoured, dressed uniformly in black armour and helmets. Some of the townspeople eyed her with suspicion, but quickly brushed past her to gather in the centre of the town. Confused, curious, eager to find some shelter in a place that wasn't out to kill her, she fell in with the crowd and kept her head bowed low.

A screaming voice pierced through the storm.

_ "Help me! Help me! Get off me! What the hell is wrong with you?! Somebody help!" _

Her gaze snapped up. She stretched on her tiptoes in search of the voice, pushing her way to the middle of the crowd. A tall wooden post was the centrepoint of the gathering, surrounded by stacks of branches and twisting piles of hempen rope. Just ahead, a number of armed guards were dragging a screaming women towards the post. The rain had ceased but the thunder was loud, and still this stranger's voice broke through the waging war in the sky as she thrashed against her captors. Grace looked frantically at the faces around her, searching for an expression other than vague irritation.

"What's going on?" She asked, as the captured woman twisted and turned in the arms of one of the silent guards. "Why aren't you doing something?!"

“We  _ are  _ doing something,” growled the man next to her, his face lost behind a thick tangle of beard. “She stabbed Johnny in the goddamn neck and cut his finger off to add to her fucking necklace. This is how the Mayor likes to deal with shit like that.”

“Oh my God,” she said uselessly. The woman broke free for just a second, taking a few bounding steps before the guards dragged her to the ground.

"You don't live here. What th' hell you doin' here, anyway?" He spat on the ground and returned his eyes to the scene before them. "It's town custom, just what we do to people like her. You best get out of here, stranger. She's not gonna be so pretty much longer."

"What are they gonna do to her?" She pressed. “Are they gonna-?”

"Jesus Christ, kid, they’re gonna burn her, that’s just how it is. Doesn’t even matter if she’s guilty or not, it's just what we do. You stand there and start cheering when everybody else does, that’ll get you a bed for the night, place to stay a while. Just stand there and think about how lucky you are, how’s that sound? ‘Least you aren’t her.”

Rooted to the spot, Grace couldn’t have moved if she wanted to, couldn’t have averted her eyes even if she tried. A guard forced the woman’s arms behind her back, wrapping them around the post and tying her with rope. Another approached with a canister of gasoline. The crowd began to yell and curse. The woman's eyes darted from face to face, her breathing heavy and laboured as her struggling finally ceased. The guard lashed gasoline across the piles of rope and stacks of wood, drenching every inch of the pyre. A torch was lit, then another. Grace locked eyes with the stranger and the whole world fell away. She dripped with gasoline, struggled fiercely against the guards, and called out two words.

Grace dropped to her knees. She unzipped her backpack, hands rooting through, mind whirring with a million things that could go wrong. The only possessions she had now were those she’d left behind in her bedroom from the night before - a Tuesday night spent with Amata, dancing, reading, thinking about getting high and deciding against it, playing ping pong across her bed when they got bored of everything else. 

She knew exactly what to do.

Her hand closed around the ping-pong ball, then the penknife. The stranger spat gasoline on the ground. Grace cut a hole in the ping-pong ball. She nicked her thumb. The stranger screamed. She found a pencil buried among piles of crumpled paper and stuck it through the hole. There was a half-finished sandwich squashed beneath one of her books. She tossed it aside, only needing the aluminium foil it was wrapped in. Once her device was covered in foil, she slid the pencil out and jumped to her feet, slung her bag over her shoulder. Flames were climbing along the coils of rope, eating the surrounding brambles and sticks. Grace tapped on the man with the beard. “I need a lighter.” His eyes didn’t shift from the spreading flame. "I need a lighter! Hey! Can you hear me?"

He slapped one into her palm. She ignited the flame with a  _ click  _ and held it beneath her makeshift bomb. A thick white cloud began to billow from its chimney. Grace shoved through the crowd, pushing her way towards the helpless woman whose bare feet were now bright red and blistering. She dropped the device behind her. The smoke spread in a hazy dome around the pyre, creating a grey barrier across her vision as she fumbled with the ropes that bound the woman to her post. She pulled them loose. The stranger fell heavily on her hands and knees, but didn't waste another second before scrambling to her feet. The guards drew their weapons. Grace took the stranger's hand. Together, they sprinted across the road ahead and left the blinding haze behind as bullets echoed behind them.

The stranger caught her breath before Grace did. The rain had picked up again and was lashing at their backs, flooding the wasteland's quiet ambience and drenching them both to the skin. The stranger made a futile attempt at wringing out her sopping wet hair, then signalled to her rescuer to head towards the abandoned diner just off the road. She swung open the glass door and ushered Grace inside, then shut it behind her to dull the raging storm. She leaned her head back against the door for a moment and shut her eyes, then made her way across the cracked tiles with a noticeable limp in her step. Her pain was evident in every unsteady movement, until she sank down into one of the booths and took the time to examine herself. Her wrists were red and raw, and to Grace's visible horror, barbed wire was twisted around her legs and feet, leaving dried-up trails of blood across her bare skin.

“Woah, woah, let me help you with that,” Grace offered, gingerly setting her backpack down next to the bleeding stranger and beginning to root for her medical equipment. “I think I have painkillers just - oh, here.”

The woman raised an eyebrow, watching her for a moment before returning her gaze to the mess that had been made of her legs. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” She asked, perturbed but unresisting as Grace prodded for a vein on her neck and injected a dose of Med-X. “Jesus Christ, it’s been a day.” 

“Oh, uh, I- I’m qualified,” Grace assured her. She examined the barbs cautiously for a moment before getting to work on removing them. “You don’t have to worry about getting infected or anything, I’m a doctor, a real doctor. Promise.”

“That’s the worrying thing,” she replied, wincing every so often as her injuries were seen to. “Tell me you scavenged that Vault suit from somewhere and that terrified fish-out-of-water look is just your natural expression. Otherwise, you're in a nuclear barrel of shit."

It took her a moment to realise what she was asking. “Oh, I’m- I’m not really, you know, from around here,” she said lamely. “I’m from Vault 101. I only just got out, my Dad, he- he left, I’ve been trying to find him but, you know, it’s- it’s not exactly... well, people aren’t- I mean, you know, they aren’t-” Her voice broke, tears welling in her eyes as she finally caught herself stammering. “They aren’t nice.”

“Oh, Christ,” said the stranger, as Grace scrubbed tears from her eyes. “Oh,  _ Christ.” _

“Yeah, I- I went to, uh, to Springvale,” she gulped, fighting urgently to calm herself down and focus on easing off the last of the wire. “And Fairfax, I went to Fairfax. I thought I was gonna die. I kind of feel like I might die any second, you know? Like all it’ll take is for one person to walk in here, and that’ll be all that kills me.”

“Jesus Christ. Looks like you really are new around here.”

“”I only got out a few hours ago. It’s been a long story. Long day.”

"I've got the time. More than you, by the looks of it. Vault kids don't live long around here.”

Grace looked up at her. "You mean there are more Vaults around here?”

"Sure, I've seen a few. Stopped scavving through them after the last one I found. You don’t wanna see the mess they made of those poor bastards in there. Social experiments, chemical tests, the same sick story over and over again. Seems like 101 is the only one still working like it was supposed to. We get runners every now and then, so I'm told. Every few years you find another dead bastard in a Vault suit with no one to bury them."

Grace laughed uneasily. “That’s not true. Nobody leaves the Vault, that’s why everything went crazy when Dad… when my dad left.”

The stranger looked sceptical, but she didn’t press, nor did Grace want her to. She knew what her home was like better than anyone else. And after today, she understood better than ever why the door was never supposed to open. “I don’t care what any of you people think about us,” she said. It came out more like an affirmation than anything else. “People are safe down there, they’re happy. We don’t kill each other or- or try to hurt each other and no one ever has to-”

"Look, the only thing that concerns me about you, Vaultie,” the stranger interrupted, “is where you're going next. Believe it or not, Carrington's one of the most hospitable places you’re likely to find around here. I know you’ve had some close-calls with raiders, but those assholes are a walk in the park compared to the Geiger counter monstrosities you'll find out here. Tell me where your Dad went and tell you if he’s still alive, how’s that sound?”

“I don’t know where he went,” she replied, a little more bitterly than intended. “He never told me.”

“Oh, great. Have we at least got some ambiguous clues? A cryptic goodbye letter? What, did he think you’d go and buy a fucking map?” She huffed out a disgusted noise. “You don’t just throw away a  _ better life underground’ _ for some stupid midlife crisis bullshit. Wherever he’s going, he’s not coming back. This isn’t gonna be easy.”

“I know, I know, he-”

“Looks like we’re stuck with each other for a while.”

"Hold on - what?"

"You saved my life, I owe you one, and-"

"You don't have to-"

_ "And,"  _ she continued sharply, "our fiery friends back in Carrington took all my stuff. I don't have anything right now. Or anybody."

“Because you killed a guy and cut off his finger,” she pointed out, feeling bolder with every minute she spent with this stranger. “I don’t know really if you deserve to- well, to _die_ for that, but I still think I’d be better off staying by myself, okay?”

“Just take a second to remember the guy who put those bruises on your neck. It was one of  _ those  _ guys I stabbed to death. Maybe not from Springvale, maybe not from Fairfax, but one of them. It’s called getting even.” She tugged at the back of her neck, revealing - Grace’s stomach heaved - a string of human fingers. Real life human fingers. Her brain took too long to process the sight; when she tuned back in, the stranger was already continuing, “So I was thinking we could head through Andale - those guys always let you stay for dinner - or maybe head back to the cosier parts of Springvale, see if we can find any leads. You seem to have a knack for waltzing into raider gangs, I can make use of that. Or there's Big Town, but they'd be about as helpful as a bag of brahmin crap right now.”

Her gaze wouldn’t budge from the finger necklace. She forgot to speak for a moment. She forgot to ask what a brahmin was. “Look, uh, you seem, uh, really nice and everything, but-”

“No I don't, that’s why you need me. You only get so many chances out here, and you’re being way too quick to waste them. Forget what you learned down there - up here, we don’t go easy on people, we don’t talk things through, but that doesn’t mean we’re monsters. I keep you safe from the people who’ve been trying to kill you, you keep me patched up if I ever get burned at the stake again, we have a really great time and you find your dad. There’s more in that for me than you know, so don’t worry about being a burden.” She extended her hand. “Go on. Pretty please?”

Just as Grace was asking herself what the hell she thought she was doing, she took the stranger’s hand and shook it, feeling much less like a stranger already. 

“Okay. I trust you. My name’s Grace Arlyn. Nice to meet you.”

"Nice to meet you too," her new friend smiled. "You can call me O'Reilly.”


	6. I is for Intelligence!

_ "Did you know, there are those amongst us who would shatter our hopes for peace, order, and security? These radical malcontents don't care about you. They don't care about America! All they care about is fulfilling their own selfish desires. Let's take a tally of these agitators, shall we?" _

* * *

 

The Capital Wasteland seemed like an endless valley of rock and rubble, an ugly wound picked raw a few too many times. There was an anger about this place, miles and miles of restless energy, the same kind that radiated from the leather-clad woman who followed her footsteps. There was something about her that wouldn’t stitch together, something oddly mismatching about her lopsided smile and the cold sweep of her eyes across the barren landscape. Rain slapped hard against the ground as they walked with shoulders hunched, O’Reilly shifting to high-alert at every clap of thunder while Grace just beamed up at the sky, marvelling at it all. 

“Gotta love the outdoors, huh?” Her new friend remarked. “So big you can’t even see the ceiling.”

“I could do without all the murderers, though,” she replied, her smile slipping a little when she remembered the schoolhouse, a little more when she remembered Fairfax. “And, uh, what did that guy say a second ago? Something about mutants?” They’d spent the past half hour listening to the only radio signal her Pip-Boy would pick up on, its narrator speaking fondly of the good old days before America had fallen, as if it had happened last summer and not two hundred years ago. Still, she found herself enjoying all the little chats about family pets and baseball before he inevitably steered back towards the horrors of the wasteland and the big old mess they’d all made of the entire world. It was more than a little bit frightening.

“Hey, I’m more worried about your taste in talk shows than the super mutants across the water. That guy’s been droning on since forever about the nifty ol’ US-of-A. Seriously, who the hell cares about how great barbecue parties used to be back in the good old days? Assholes, that’s who. But, yeah, about the super mutants. I mean, I don’t have any tips other than avoid at any cost and run like hell otherwise. They’re big, yellow and ugly as hell, won’t be long before you start hearing the stories. I don’t wanna spoil anything for you, but I’m still not convinced they tear people up and boil ‘em in giant cauldrons. But, hey, let’s hope we never find out, right?”

Grace stared at her in disbelief, trying to figure out if she was joking. “So how do people even survive out here? Are there other towns like Carrington? Do you think-?” She quickly swallowed the lump in her throat. “Do you think my dad will be alright, if that’s really what’s out there?”

“I wish I could tell you, kid, but neither of us have any idea where your old man’s going - if he’s heading into the city, it’s not gonna be good. But you must have tried Megaton, right? If nobody heard of him there, that might be a good sign, means he’s laying low.” She paused at Grace’s puzzled frown. “What, you mean-? Oh, for the love of- you didn’t try Megaton, did you? For Christ’s sake, Vaultie, the giant garbage heap full of people,  _ right  _ on 101’s front lawn? You’re telling me you missed that?!”

“It- it was really bright,” she admitted, feeling like an idiot. “I didn’t know where I was going, I- I just kept following the road and then I saw the school and- and after that, I didn’t want to turn back. I thought if I turned back again I’d just… I mean, I think I would have just…”

“Just kept battering that big metal door until someone let you back underground, huh?”

Grace nodded, keeping her gaze locked on the ground. “You think he might have been there?”

“No idea, Vaultie. But there’s plenty of other towns he could have gone to, might have done the exact same thing you did and tried not to look back. You damn Vault Dwellers might be more stubborn than you look, but carving out a living by the skin of your teeth when there are monsters knocking on your door every damn day, that’s exclusive to us wastelanders. There’ll be other settlements. Right now, we need to- oh, shit.”

“What?” Grace asked, shouting to be heard over the sudden boom of thunder. “What’s wrong?”

“This storm just turned a little too radioactive for my liking!” She yelled back, picking up pace and gesturing towards the clicking Geiger counter on Grace’s wrist. “I was gonna try and get us to Big Town but it’s too late for that. See that gate over there by the hill? Looks like a Vault entrance, might be able to hide in the entryway ‘til it passes.”

"Another one? Right there? You mean-?" Grace hurried to keep up, heart jumping in something that could have been excitement or terror. “But you were out in that storm back in Carrington! The whole town was out there!”

“The whole town’s been living in a radioactive hellscape since they were born, Vaultie. You’re a special case.” She clamped a hand around Grace’s arm and pulled, hurrying her onward until the gate was within reach. By the time they made it to the entrance, Grace was blinded by rainfall, barely able to see the panicked grasping of O’Reilly’s hands on the control panel outside, only just overhearing her muttered grumble of “Goddammit, I hate these things!” before they were heading inside, letting the darkness swallow them whole.

It didn’t look an awful lot like home. Even the aching creak of the door sealing shut didn’t match the sound effects of her great escape from Vault 101. Where were the humming electrics and fluorescent lights? Why was all the furniture upturned and the floor strewn with garbage? Grace hugged herself, feeling somehow colder than she had outside. Above all, this place was _dark,_ relentlessly so, as if it hadn’t seen inhabitants in years and very much didn’t want to. It was like something from a nightmare, the kind of Vault she would have seen in an anxious dream about speeding through the corridors at night while Mr Brotch chased after her in search of overdue assignments. Not something she’d ever wanted to see in the real world, and she was long past letting herself believe that this was a dream.

But soon she became less certain of that. Though O’Reilly insisted they stay put, Grace’s urge to delve deeper into the Vault was growing stronger with every tentative bite of the pre-packaged pre-owned pre-war snack cakes she’d spent the past few minutes trying to eat. She couldn’t understand her new friend’s intense hatred for Vaults and anything to do with them; she point-blank refused to head any further than the entrance, leaving Grace with no option but to go it alone. After a few minutes of weighing up the pros and cons, she decided that venturing deeper into the Vault promised a wide variety of potential disasters ranging from dismemberment to radiation sickness, and the thought of one wrong step bringing the entire upper floor down over her defenceless body was not a cheerful one. But what if there were medical supplies? What if there was edible food and a clean jumpsuit or two? What if there was  _ information,  _ so she could get a little closer to figuring out the real story behind the Vaults, so she could find out whether O’Reilly’s cocksure claims were any closer to the truth than the one she’d been brought up with her entire life.

What if it was warmer a little further in? Dammit, it was cold in the entryway.

“Will you at least come running in if I scream?” Grace asked, more than a little hopefully.

O’Reilly put her hand over her heart and swore to valiantly carry out her bleeding corpse if necessary.

It would have to do.

* * *

 

It was like there was no one else alive on earth. Just her and the dark and the damp, just her and her footsteps and the letters on the ground, crinkling beneath her boots as she creeped through the hallways, knowing this place was nothing like home. She thought about heading back, but her feet were persistent. And she was afraid to look back. She couldn’t shake the feeling that there were eyes on her, and every now and then she heard footsteps - not the distant thud of some toppled object or the abstract clank of hidden mechanisms at work. Being the only person alive in what should have been a community of hundreds, thousands, came with the certain knowledge that noises which sounded like footsteps were, in fact, footsteps. Being one of the only people still sane in a world full of maniacs and killers came with the certain knowledge that noises which sounded like footsteps were, in fact, footsteps and were, in fact, coming straight towards her.

She hurried and hurried and thought about survivors. Could people be living here, surviving in the dank and frigid depths of this place? Could people have lived here throughout the centuries, hiding in some tiny sealed off corner of the Vault, some sure but secret proof that her home was not the only remnant of the days before the war, that there were others untouched by the chaos up above? And what if the dwellers, if they were still around, were more like the monsters at the schoolhouse than anybody from back home? She thought those were her only options - remnants or raiders, but probably nobody. She thought she had a clue about all of this. She thought that very little in the world made sense anymore, but some things did, and the person who emerged from the doorway ahead  did  _ not  _ make sense. Grace’s mind fought back against the sight, but her eyes were insistent about the man who wandered out from the doorway to her left.

“Dad?”

Her face crumpled. The air left her lungs. Her legs trembled beneath  the weight of every second leading up to this - the killing, the running, the terror, the  _ pain _ , everything she’d done in these short few hours as she clawed and fought and searched with every shred of strength inside her to find him, and he’d been here all along, waiting for her. “Dad, I- I thought you- I'm sorry, I'm so, so sorry, daddy, I-"

“Oh, Gracie.” His eyes crinkled at the corners, wet with tears - she’d seen him cry before, she’d seen this look of sadness and pride all mixed up into one, every time he talked about her mother, every time he realised she was growing up, finding wit and courage and freedom in a place he thought had always just been grey. Had this been a test of all that, to give her a taste of this place, to help her understand why they lived the way they did? She didn’t care. He put his arms around her and all she wanted in the world was to hug him and let him tell her it was alright, it was over, it was time to go home.

"Oh, sweetheart," her father said, "they're going to gut you like a pig out there."

He slammed her head against the wall. Her teeth crashed together. His fist smashed into her nose, coming back bloody before colliding with her cheek. In her head she screamed but her mouth could only whimper, a frantic, pleading sound threaded with the words  _ no, no, please, no, stop, please.  _ She looked at his face for a second, just a second, and saw the feral, spitting animal her father had become. What had this place done to him? The thought was knocked from her head as he grabbed a fistful of hair and smacked her head once more against the steel. She was nothing but flailing fists and feet - she felt boneless, empty, how could she take a swing when she had loved him all her life, how could she fight back when he was pinning her arms above her head and throwing a brutal punch into her gut?

The next blow tore her lip open. The next sent her flying hard against the opposite wall, sinking down and down so he could drive a foot into her stomach - again, again, until the pain became chemical, eating up her organs bit by bit. He pulled her to her feet by the hair. His eyes were crinkled at the corners. She couldn’t bear to look anymore. She couldn’t bare the pain. So she let agony seize every inch of her body and she pushed it all into her fists.

She swung. James fell back like he’d been hit by a creature twice his size, but it wasn’t enough. What would be enough for this awful strength bubbling inside her? 

She hit him again. 

_ “Sweetheart, what are you doing?!” _

She hit him again. 

_ “Grace, no, stop, please!”  _

She threw him to the ground. He tried to take another swing and she knew it wasn't over. Grace  pressed her thumbs hard into her father's eyes and pushed and pushed, stomach heaving as he spasmed beneath her, as her nails pierced through eyes that had looked exactly the same as hers before her fingers clawed through them and sent chunks of white jelly spilling down his cheeks. Grace Arlyn knew all the parts of the eye.  _ Pupil, cornea, sclera -  _ her dad begged for his little girl to stop but her anger was a raging beast thrashing through her bones -  _ lens, iris, ciliary body -  _ when she pulled her hands back they were dripping with fluid and gunk and trembling, trembling -  _ choroid, retina, fovea -  _ and she threw up the contents of her stomach over the floor.

Blood pulsed in her skull and dripped down her face. She ached in a way that didn’t promise recovery. Through her half-swollen eyes, she saw her father’s spasms die down. She watched him jerk and twitch and take a deep, gasping breath. And that was it. No ceremony, no goodbye, nothing but her shaking hands as she crawled towards him, not daring to touch, or speak, or breathe. All she could do was stare, features twisted in blank-eyed terror as his jaw gave a violent jut. Her father’s mouth - gaping, featureless, hungry - gave way to a single skittering radroach that scuttled down his chest. It seemed impossible that she'd murdered to fathers today. Her best friend's. Her own. It seemed ridiculous that all she could think about was tumbling down into those empty eye sockets and disappearing into blackness.

So she did.

The cockroaches followed.

She was running, running as fast she could through corridors and corridors, deeper and deeper into the Vault, into the blue - flashing behind her eyes, it _became_ her eyes, it filled her lungs, the blue, the deep, it all made sense - and her chest was aching and her teacher was chasing her. She didn’t know how this was possible but when Mr Brotch grabbed her arm and swung her around to face him it felt very, very real. She watched as his face flashed between his own and a stranger’s, every second a different pair of eyes on her, a different set of teeth trying to rip into flesh, a different nose that crunched against the blow of her forehead as she slammed against him, knocked him back and ran once more, deeper and deeper and deeper into the blue.

_ “That’s a week of detentions for you, Miss Arlyn! Now, what would your father think about that!” _

On and on she tumbled, the world rising up far overhead - or was she shrinking? Colossal leather boots shot up like trees around her as she scurried like a rat around the legs of the Tunnel Snakes. Daring to look up, she found herself staring wide at a tangle of arms, a glimpse of a face - brown skin, thin smirk, cold eyes, Butch Deloria - and before she knew it the world was snapping back like a rubber band, hitting with a sharp smack against her skin and there were half a hundred hands on her body, and the world was nothing but darkness and  this _.  _ She knew who was touching her, she didn’t need to look, but her stomach flipped when she saw him, unable to connect Butch’s face, Butch’s loud, screaming presence, with the multitude of hands gliding across every inch of her body, groping, teasing, pulling, pinching. She wriggled and kicked and fought for freedom, willed for a sudden light to appear and let her free - at some moments, an untethered gasp and a flitter of something warm and sweet and then gone, replaced by a jerk of pain and white-hot panic and his voice in her head a million times over and-

No. Not here. This wasn’t home, this wasn’t him, and this was a not a girl who would take this.

“You wanna see a real tunnel snake?” He echoed, a hundred million times in a voice that filled the room before she pulled herself free and shot Butch Deloria in the head.

* * *

 

_ Breathe deep,  _ her brain told her,  _ and relax. _

Who cared about her dad, really? He’d left her behind, after all, he hadn’t cared, it never mattered. He was dead now anyway, so what? She would be dead soon too. But if she stayed - oh, if she stayed. To breathe deep in the blue and relax, let her tired bones rest, oh, just a while, just a little while. She didn’t care much for seeing the sky again. Hope and violence, what did it matter, why hurt so much just to see the stars? It was better in the dark. Her life was nothing more than these four walls and the reflection of herself that told her this would be alright. Her body was reflected  _ in perpetuum,  _ back and forth and back and forth, a hundred thousand Grace Arlyns reflected back and forth and not one of them cared one bit for going home or getting out, except the girl standing in the middle, talking to a ghost. Talking to herself. There were no mirrors in Vault 106.

“Come on, relax!” Her reflection urged. “Don’t leave.”

DON’T LEAVE, agreed every terminal in the room. DON’T LEAVE, DON’T LEAVE.

“I can’t stay here,” Grace said, wanting to mean it. “I can’t live underground again.”

“Stay,” Grace insisted. “It’s nice to be in the dark, right?”

STAY HERE, the terminals said. WE HAVE EVERYTHING YOU NEED.

“It’s only for a little while,” Grace promised. “Relax. It’s okay.”

Grace felt she had enough on her mind without all these empty copies of herself trying to bother her right now. She needed to finish that history assignment. She needed to claw her way back out of here and run, run far, bring O’Reilly with her, maybe, but run until there was nothing but running. She wanted to stay. She wanted to live.

“Don’t you like it better here?” Grace asked, but it sounded more like  _ don’t you dare move a muscle. _

“I like the sky,” Grace said, but it sounded more like  _ please, please, I don’t think I can breathe. _

DON’T LEAVE. ALL YOUR FRIENDS ARE HERE. ALL YOU NEED IS HERE. WE LOVE YOU.

“You’re going to die,” Grace told her. “You’re killing yourself. You weren’t made for war and running, you were made for peace. You were made for blankets and night lights and white noise, you’re all softness and blunt edges and a tiny little voice that never learned how to shout. You’re already dead. You're a goner, Grace. You feel it?”

SERIOUSLY, JUST STAY. DON’T YOU LOVE IT? DON’T YOU WANT TO RELAX A LITTLE?

“I just want good food and friends and a sleeping bag,” Grace said. “I want sunrises and campfires.”

She said this, and she meant this, but it came out sounding a little bit like  _ I want my dad  _ and a little bit like  _ I want to go home.  _ S he tried to plead for safety and freedom as if the two went hand-in-hand but the blank-eyed face of another Grace Arlyn was speaking, slack-jawed and angry, and it was saying "O ne stray bullet and it’s over, one wrong step and it’s over, no more eating well and making things, no more grey hair and bad poetry, no more omens and rebirths and memories, one wrong turn into something that looks like safety and your ashes will be whipped up by a radioactive wind".

“Is this what you want, you stupid bitch?!”

Roaches were crawling all over her and the walls were black as chasms. The room was just black and black and black, an apathetic vacuum somewhere in outer space, the gaping mouth of some quiet beast. And then the walls were terminal screens and they told her  _ forget the wanting. Forget the grief. Life is too short for running.  _

Miles and miles ahead, she saw a light.

_ There are no fake friends here. No cruel jokes, no sarcasm, no brittle smiles. _

She’d read stories about rabbit holes. She wasn’t sure if this was an entrance or an exit.

_ Close your eyes. Relax. Breathe deep. It’s alright. _

“Go to hell,” she said, and ran like a rabbit with a fox on her tail.

_ Fine. Be that way. I have nothing else to say to you. _

* * *

 

“It’s alright, Gracie,” Amata said, shushing her gently the way she always did, stroking her hair the way she always did. “It’s okay, you’re okay, you’re safe.” Her girlfriend kissed her brow and held her close. It was only when Grace’s swollen eyes cracked open that she realised she was being carried. The blood in her eyes painted the walls red. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

She knew it was too much to believe she was home. She had never known this kind of pain at home, a sharp and unforgiving ache that tugged on every muscle, every bone. If this was pain, it acted like some petulant child, restlessly poking and prodding and pulling, demanding her full and unwavering attention. She was too weak to fight it, so she pretended this was real, that Amata’s voice was not tinged by an accent she didn’t have a name for yet. 

“I wanna stop,” she whimpered, as O’Reilly lowered her down on the floor. She braced herself for the sting of cold, but the surface was warm and wrinkled - clothes, blankets, she couldn’t open her eyes to figure out what her makeshift bed was made from. “I wanna make it go away.”

“Jesus Christ, this is my fault.” O’Reilly’s voice, wavering. “Shit, shit, right, uh, okay, I know where to go, but you sure as hell aren’t moving anywhere yet. Those guys were fucking insane - blocked them in, should be alright, we can't stay here - oh, shit, that’s bleeding again. Look, I’m gonna have to leave you here, okay? I can't carry you, you won't make it without help. I’ll get some people, I’ll get you out of here, I swear to God. Listen to me, Vaultie, can you hear me? You’re gonna be alright.”

“Don’t,” she breathed. “Don’t, please.”

“You’re gonna be just fine.”

A sharp pinch on her skin. A trickle of warmth. Numb. Hurting. 

“Please.”

“Don’t fall asleep - that’s bad, right? Concussion, bad, right, uh, I’m gonna put the radio on, just- just listen to that, stay awake, I’ll go as fast as I can. Don’t die on me, Vaultie.”

But there was nothing she wanted to do more.

* * *

 

_ “Thanks for listening children, you’re listening to Three Dog and this is Galaxy News Radio, bringing you the truth - no matter how bad it hurts! Now, if you’d been tuning in a little while ago, friends, you’d know that Megaton’s good old neighbour, that big ass tin can called Vault 101, has been unscrewed yet again, by none other than a very serious-looking middle-aged guy who, according to some reliable reports, has one smooth-sounding voice. Looks like your favourite radio host has something in common with this guy already, huh? James Arlyn, if you’re out there, head to old Three Dog at GNR Station if you need a brother to set you straight. And to the rest of you out there: be kind to our new neighbour, show him that here, on the outside, we’re always fighting the good fight.” _

* * *

 

“Oh, crap, who’d you bring me this time, O’Reilly? Aw, Jesus. Bring her in.”


	7. A is for Agility!

_ "Remember, children, when the raiders come, there ain't no shame in locking your doors, barricading the windows, and cowering under the nearest bed. When these psychos come to play, they have one thing on their minds: making your life as fucking miserable as humanly possible. Raiders can't be bargained or reasoned with, and there ain't no use surrendering. Run, hide, shoot if you have to, but for God's sake, don't go wavin' the white flag. They'll just strangle you with it." _

* * *

 

The pain was like the end of the world. She writhed in and out of consciousness on a gore-soaked stretcher and thought someone was taking her photograph - Jonas flashing the camera on her tenth birthday party when she got her first BB gun, minutes before she’d shot the legs off a radroach and cried for an hour, years before she’d shot her first pistol and murdered her best friend’s father. The fluorescent light buzzed overhead like a swarm of insects crawling on her skin, over and through, spilling from between her teeth and crawling out her ears like her insides were incubators for radroaches, like there was nothing in the world but radroaches, like there was nothing in the world but blistering pain and four paint-stripped walls boasting of a broken mirror and blood, so much blood. 

The hallucinogen still stained her veins. First, the flickering of the light. Then her father’s empty eye sockets eating up her vision until she fell back into fever-twitching dreams, all black boots and blue light and hands that crawled without bodies or names attached to them. Hot, blistering agony like something feral was chewing up her insides, like her insides were boiling over, like there was nothing else that mattered but the pain that could serve only one purpose: to kill her quietly, because that was the only way she’d learned how to die. Thoughts were jittery and unstable things, miles out of reach, endlessly above her while she fell further into blackness and burning.

Tetanus. Timebomb. Tunnel Snake. 

_ “In charge? I’m about as in charge as a mother leading her kids out of a war zone, you know that.” _

Birthdays. Bottle caps. Blood.

_ “I’m not asking you for money. I’m asking for help. Please. They might be dead already.” _

Ribcage. Running. Rust.

_ “You’re a goner, Grace. You feel it?” _

Hell yes, she felt it. She felt it on the tips of her fingers. She felt it just a breath behind her, like a taste on her tongue, like the fourteenth stitch in her stomach. She felt it, goddamn she felt it, and it was terminal - her life would be war and running until she couldn’t catch a breath, nothing but sharp edges and fatal blows and the death of parts of her she’d never had the chance to meet. 

_ “She’ll be out for a couple hours. You think she could fight them off too?” _

She’d read stories about rabbit holes. She was ready to run.

_ “Thank you. Oh my God, thank you. She’ll be alright. Promise.” _

She wanted to live.

* * *

 

The pain was pounding like fists against a locked door, but Grace Arlyn would be okay. Seventeen stitches for her stomach, another few for her eyebrow, her lip, her left eye and her right cheek. A few cracked ribs, a dislocated knuckle or three, a mild concussion, two chipped teeth and a broken nose. A glazed look in her eyes that the doctor didn’t diagnose. Memories that hurt worse than her healing injuries, words that didn’t make sense when repeated three times over. She needed time to breathe and think, but fresh air had only ever been a dream and cognitive function was difficult after trauma both mental, emotional, and blunt.

Her father had not tried to kill her but, illusion or not, she now knew the feeling of squeezing out his eyes and watching his dying body squirm beneath her. She had not killed her father, but she knew the sound of his pleading cries so well that they rang in her ears on repeat, as frequent and grating as a Vault Emergency Announcement. In a while, she would forget it all - she hoped. For now, all she could do was try to focus her eyes on the hazy red figure that was talking to her, vision blurring from all the Med-X in her veins. She tried not to think about what state the syringes had been in and just focus on the words that danced around her head. Something about a police station. 

“Look, I don’t know if Bittercup and Sticky made it or not,” Red continued, in a voice remarkably controlled for a girl whose hands were wriggling in the guts of a dying kid called Timebomb. Grace could only watch and learn as she dug a bullet out of his stomach mid-sentence.  “Dusty only said that they were checking out the police station near Germantown and never came back. I think it’s- you know,  _ them _ . The usual ones.” At Grace’s confusion, she elaborated, “Slavers. Just another brand of raider, really, except these ones like to drag you off to Paradise Falls and- well, nobody knows what happens after that. Not for certain.”

“And these guys just… come around all the time?” She asked. “Can you fight back?”

“What, you mean defend ourselves? Out here?” Red laughed, without a trace of humour. She plunked the gory bullet onto the nearest tray. Six more to go. “All we can do out here is our best, for as long as possible. For most of us, that means hiding under our beds and hoping the slavers drag away our friends instead of us.”

Grace looked at her, feeling her bleary eyes well up. Even in the dim light she could see the girl’s steely eyes glinting, small and puffy with exhaustion. It seemed like she’d lived a few lifetimes worth of trauma, but she couldn’t have been any older than sixteen. “Isn’t there anywhere else you can go? Is there anybody out there who can help?”

“There’s a lot you don’t know about where us Big Town kids came from, Grace. Nobody's watching out for us out here. Don’t stress yourself out over it - seriously, those are some, uh, pretty intense injuries, and I’m asking a lot of you as it is. But with the way things are at the minute… just believe me when I tell you there’s nowhere we can go. And those slavers already know we’re weak out here. Once they’re done with Bittercup and Sticky, they’re gonna come back and take more and more of us. We just can’t -  _ I _ can’t - just let that happen. Not anymore.” 

“Then we help,” Grace decided. “We have to do something. O’Reilly, what do we do?”

“You can start by ditching the plucky hero complex before you get yourself killed,” she advised, watching Grace dubiously from near the doorway.

“I’m not trying to be a hero,” she protested. “But how am I supposed to find my dad if I can’t even face what’s out there? All I’ve done today is run away, and who’s that gonna help? But if we can fight them and  _ win,  _ that means there’s a chance for something else. Something that isn’t running.”

Red smiled, a strange and sad sight to see on somebody stitching up a bullet hole. 

“It’s not your decision,” she continued. “I guess it’s okay if you don’t want to help, but I do. Maybe I can’t be a hero, but I’m going to be brave this time, to help good people. People who saved my life.”

“It’s suicide. I get the idea behind it, I really do, but it’s gonna be ugly. It’s gonna hurt if we don’t win.”

“Then let’s win,” she said. “Let’s be heroes if we have to.”

“You’re the craziest thing that’s happened to me all day, Vaultie. Red, you got any guns?”

“Sweet talk Dusty and he’ll cough up what he can. Don’t expect a miracle, though.”

“Are you kidding?” Grace asked. “You sort of brought me back from the dead.”

“And victories like that are in short supply around here. Be brave if you have to, but don’t waste them.”

She promised that she wouldn't.

* * *

 

All they had to do was follow the trail of blood.

The Germantown Police Headquarters was choked by barbed wire and guarded by a chain-link maze. The green-tinged sky was rotting into black, silver pockmarks dotting the horizon. Grace’s eyes were fixed on the shimmery blood trails, feeling the terror and violence of just a few muddy splats across the ground. She listened out for voices, some sign that there were slavers hidden amongst the sprawl of army tents. It was quiet. 

“Too quiet...” O’Reilly mumbled, before her face split into a grin. “Aw, sweet, I always wanted to say that.”

“Let’s go in the back way,” Grace suggested, eyeing the front entrance uneasily. Springvale Elementary had been just as easy to walk on into, she remembered, and wondered when her voice would fully return.  She wondered where the slavers were hiding. She wondered if the back entrance was locked, but all it needed was a hard kick and they were swallowed up by darkness and hallways. 

“I think I’m still a little high,” she muttered. The walls flashed blue. Her drug-addled brain tried to fill the silence with sharp ringing and her father’s voice. O’Reilly tried to fill it with off-tune humming, but the sound died when they saw the blood that trailed across the grimy floor. She tried not to think about the kids they were trying to rescue, not when she was stepping in blood that might be theirs. She tried not to think about the combat shotgun in her hands, a difficult task when you were trying to remember how to reload it, when you were trying to remember that it was okay to shoot these people, it was okay to kill anybody who tried to hurt her, or O’Reilly, or those kids from the town full of teenagers.

Grace forgot the meaning of  _ okay  _ when she found the bodies. And the bags of bodies.

“What the  _ fuck?”  _ O’Reilly breathed. “No, no, slavers don’t leave their gore bags behind. Grace, this is  _ bad _ .”

Grace blinked. She blinked again. It wasn’t a fever dream, it wasn’t a hallucination. It was only this: bodies with their limbs ripped off, still pulsing with thick, dark blood. It was entrails gleaming wetly in the flickering light, piled up on headless torsos like fuel-soaked coils of rope. It was the human head that lay at her feet, eyes ripped out and jaw torn to shreds, clinging loosely to the skull by a few threads of flesh. It was heads reduced to dark stains on the tiles where they’d been smashed into paste instead of pieces. It was bodies bent in ways no human could ever manage, bones sticking out and splintered like cheap wood, distorted in ways so broken they escaped the definition of human.

She wasn’t oblivious anymore. She knew that people out here could hurt people like this and  _ would  _ \- but only if they could, and these people had been ripped apart in ways a raider could only dream of. But it didn’t matter. Because it wasn’t raiders they found around the corner.

The things were a mass of hulking muscle and cracked yellow skin. Thick pieces of leather and metal crisscrossed over their bulging torsos. Their exposed flesh was all bloody gashes and blue veins. These were storybook monsters, the kind that picked their teeth with human bones - and of those there were plenty, protruding grotesquely from the mangled bodies that lay strewn about the room like discarded dolls. She could only clamp her mouth shut from her position by the door frame and hope that these things that looked too much and not enough like people, couldn’t smell her terror from where she stood, frozen still, gaping wordlessly at these shaky overblown human silhouettes with teeth and fists and voices that rumbled through the darkness, speaking crudely and impossibly in English.

“Can we do this?” Grace whispered. "Hell, doesn't matter if we can't. We have to."

She gave herself a self-indulgent second to say  _ oh, God  _ and then she shot the mutant in the shoulder.

The bullet tore right through him and n othing at all happened, except that he turned his head to look at her.

All that left O’Reilly’s mouth was  _ oh shi- _

The mutant roared and lunged for them, swinging a wooden board wildly in her direction. She fired again. A concussive  _ bang  _ ate through her eardrums and right through the mutant’s chest. She sidestepped the blow. The board slammed into O’Reilly’s ribs. Her legs left her. Grace’s eyes flashed towards the second mutant - gathering up something long and metal, not a second left for her to figure out what kind of gun it was going to kill her with. She staggered back, bracing herself for the blow that never came. A bullet in the mutant’s stomach knocked him back - and just when she thought she had time to line up a shot, she was dancing around streams of bullets from a banged up gun just big enough for a seven foot tall mutant. The weapon jittered and spat in inconsistent hails of fire, soon returned by O’Reilly’s assault rifle when she pulled herself to her feet. The board swung down again - she fired - a  _ crack -  _ it splintered apart and fell from the mutant’s grip. The thing cried out in anger and she aimed for the throat. The bullet carved a brutal dent in its neck, forcing out a strangled cry.

Stitches still intact, feeling very much not dead yet, Grace darted past the monster’s grabbing hands and aimed for the chest. Two shots, biting deep and bleeding. She remembered how to reload, but it was a difficult task when one fairy-tale horror was trying to pull your limbs apart and slap you across the face with them, made even trickier by the other mutant’s blind fire as O’Reilly shot the eyes out of its skull. She fought to put distance between herself and the mutant, loading up the shotgun as soon as she had the chance. The mutant charged and she was swept away as if by wind - the wall smacked against her skull and the thing was right there, crushing her forearm, raising a fist to knock her head off her shoulders, so she aimed for the jaw, up towards the roof of the mouth, as surgical as a teenage doctor could be with a combat shotgun and a bone about to break. She pulled the trigger.

_ Click. _

Her bullets had spilled all over the floor. She had no idea how to reload a shotgun. She had no idea how to stop this creature from ripping her arm off. She  _ did  _ know a few things about the human brain and this was much the same. She dropped beneath the swinging fist and screamed her only friend’s name. O’Reilly swivelled. She saw the desperate look and the gesture that said  _ help dying need broken wooden board now please  _ and kicked it towards her. Grace screamed as tendons ripped inside her arm. She reached and reached and closed her fingers around a loose nail driven through the board. The mutant released its grip on her arm and smacked her hard across the face. She was down and up in an instant, legs flailing, ears swelling with the laugh of the creature who was picking her up by the hair, lightning flashes of agony in her brain, one final thought in her head. She threw her arm forward and drove the nail through the monster’s eye, feeling it drill through jelly and spike right through the brain. With a sigh unfitting for a monster, the creature crumpled.

The second followed soon after, a little more bullet-riddled than the first.

With only a few busted stitches and a brain buzzing with adrenaline, Grace didn’t waste a second in gathering up her bullets and beating on through the building. O’Reilly reloaded the shotgun for her, breathlessly rambling. “Tell me we aren’t the only ones who got to see that. Dammit, that was so fucking awesome. Let’s do it again.”

But the next time they encountered the mutants was in a narrow hallway that a quick sidestep through the next door soon dealt with. If they were going to survive this, it was time to play it smart. The next hour that passed was summarised neatly by a few things: heavy breathing, near-fatal misfires, bruises, running, hiding in storage cupboards for minutes that felt like weeks. They were quiet when they could be, in and out like thieves, stepping silently on blood-splattered tiles. If she closed her eyes at the gore-soaked walls and body parts, she could still pretend they were pirates, like they were sneaks and smugglers and all the things she dreamed of being when she was little. But every misstep brought consequences that beat down on them like the mutants’ makeshift weapons - when they were spotted, the fighting was long and hard and one wrong move would take your head off your shoulders.

But they made it. Somehow, impossibly, they made it, cell key in hand, heads intact, with some extra bullets and cans of food to show for it. She felt electric. She felt unstoppable. She felt a little tired, but the people locked in the cells looked worse. 

Worse - but alive.

A smile broke across her face at the sight of them, both visibly battered and pale with exhaustion. The girl’s all-black outfit was shiny with blood, but she didn’t seem to have any serious injuries, nothing more than a cut lip and a few bruises. The younger kid looked a little more roughed up, both eyes swollen and black like the underside of a rotten fruit. They didn’t exactly seem happy to be rescued; the girl looked her saviours up and down, quirking an eyebrow and saying nothing. The boy, on the other hand, was sitting in his cell and chatting animatedly to no one in particular, something about a kid called Billy who got locked in a fridge for a hundred years. 

“Are you okay?” Grace asked, voice hushed in case the remaining mutants were still skulking nearby. O’Reilly kept a diligent patrol between each door as Grace unlocked the cells, hands still shaking with the rush of their victory. So far, so good. “Red sent us out here to help you, everybody was worried you- well, that you wouldn’t come back. Thank God you’re both okay, I bet everyone’ll be happy to see you.”

“Happy,” the girl said, mulling the word over with a sombre expression. “Foreign concept to me.”

“But Billy the Cool Guy was already blasting off to outer space,” the other kid continued. “Woah, there he goes! And all his friends waved him goodbye!”

Grace considered them both warily. It was hard to gauge whether they were traumatised or just weird teenagers, made even weirder by post-apocalyptia. “Look, uh, those _things_ , they’re kind of still around, most of ‘em, so, uh - can either of you fight? If you can find a weapon, great, but just stick close to us and we’ll sneak you out the back way and get you home to Big Town. You’ll be safe there.”

The girl scoffed. “Safe? That’s cute. I’d be safer locking myself back in that stupid cell with  _ this  _ idiot.” She shot a glare at the babbling kid. “He’s fresh out of Little Lamplight in case you couldn’t tell.”

“You wanna hear another story? How about the one about Super Dupe Dave!”

“Uh, yeah, I could tell,” replied Grace, who had no idea what either of them were talking about. “Are either of you hurt? I can fix you up before we get out of here, I- uh, I think. Maybe.”

“Oh, you think bandages and scalpels are gonna fix my broken heart?” The girl snapped. “My boyfriend - ahem,  _ ex _ -boyfriend - decided to leave me stranded in this stupid place and send you two to help me instead! You know, I thought I had something special with Timebomb. And Dusty. And Shorty. But they all broke my - oh, and Pappy - they  _ all  _ broke my heart and didn’t even try to save me. So goddamn stupid. I hate boys. I hate this place.”

“Oh, I, uh, I’m sorry to hear that,” Grace offered. “If it helps, I totally get what you mean, I'm a-”

“Once upon a time, there was this robot. His name was Super Duper Dave and he was really smart!”

“Wait - really?” The girl asked. “You really get it? I mean, not that I care, really. Screw what you think.”

“Super Dupe Dave was a real smart guy - I mean, robot - and everybody always asked him to do stuff for him! You know, because he was a genius basically.”

“Jesus Christ, can we hurry this up?” O’Reilly snapped. “Vaultie, let’s go.”

“Uh, yeah, dealing with it,” Grace said, giving her an awkward thumbs-up. “Alright, let’s get out of here. Stay behind me, keep quiet, and if anything happens just… just keep going. No matter what.”

* * *

 

Traipsing through nightfall without being savaged by giant insects and the three roving raider gangs that skulked by the other road was a difficult task with Sticky and Bittercup in tow. O’Reilly’s eye started to twitch around the plot climax of Sticky’s fourteenth asinine story, and although Grace was as kind and patient towards Bittercup as she could be, she just couldn’t keep up with the endless complaints about boys and the various ways they'd let her down. There was something comforting, she supposed, about trivial things like that, getting to talk about something other than the complete and utter devastation of the entire world. But by the time they reached Big Town, she’d gritted her teeth down to a fine powder.

At first, she thought everybody was gathered by the bridge to celebrate the successful rescue mission.

After a few more minutes she’d discover that nobody but Red cared much about the two of them anyway. The rest of them were more concerned about the attack that would follow - and no, it wasn’t the usual crowd, it wasn’t just  _ raiders but worse _ like they’d thought.

“They were, uh…” Grace struggled to get the words out, feeling like all the terror and adrenaline from back in the police HQ had been squeezed out into a large bucket and tossed right over her. “Huge, I mean, they were- well, they were _big_ and not- well, they weren’t- they, weren’t, you know. People. There were bodies, a lot of- a lot of bodies. They almost killed O’Reilly.”

“Twice,” O’Reilly added. “Thanks for the warning, Red.”

“Oh, God,” Red replied. “This is bad, this is gonna be so-”

“We’re screwed!” Cried Dusty, throwing his binoculars on the ground as if magnified vision was to blame.

“Nice going, Bittercup!” Pappy yelled. “Hope you found the stupid make-up you were looking for out there.”

“Thanks for risking your stupid life to save my ass!” Bittercup shot back. “You’re such a hero, Pappy!”

“You think playing hero’s gonna save our asses from this?” Dusty lamented. “Aw, we are so-”

“We’re dead!” Cried Timebomb, who, having just pulled through from seven gunshot wounds and two broken clavicles, might have been the most  _ or  _ least reliable voice on the matter.

“Alright, calm down!” Kimba yelled. “We can get help, we can-”

“Super Mutants, for Christ’s sake!” Dusty said. “What the hell are we gonna do when they come back for Bittercup and Sticky and God knows who else? Fight them?!”

“Well, yeah, I guess,” Grace piped.

“We are completely- wait. What did the chubby one say?”

It took Grace a second to realise he meant her. “Oh, I- I mean, yeah, I guess we’re gonna have to try and fight them.” She was met with about fifteen matching stares. “I know, I know, it- it’s scary, it’s terrifying, trust me, I was terrified too. I’ve been terrified ever since I left home. I never understood what it felt like to be scared every single second of your life because  _ everything  _ is out to kill you. I mean, I survived out here today by running as fast as I could, but how’s that gonna help when I’m gonna have to do the same thing again tomorrow? If we fight those mutants together, you’ll never have to fight them again. But if you run away, you’ll be running every day of your life.”

“What the hell is she talking about?” Kimba asked Red. “Where did this girl come from?”

“Look, I- I don’t really have the right to tell you what to do, you’ve spent your entire lives out here, and- and if you want to run or- or hide, I’ll help you, if I can. But I think maybe we can try to fight them if they come.”

“And we already killed six of ‘em,” added O’Reilly, who had the cracked ribs to prove it. “The trick is not dying before they do. And screaming, lots of that.”

“I think I’m just gonna fall back into my coma now,” Timebomb said, taking off in the direction of the doctor’s practice. “Don’t wake me, guys!”

“Hey, do you guys wanna hear a story?” Sticky asked. “Once, there was this Sentry Bot. His name was Holy Toledo and he was the biggest, meanest robot in the-”

“Hold on,” said Red. “What did you say?”

“Guys, I totally just had, like, a cool idea,” said Bittercup, looking at Grace and O’Reilly. “You guys know anything about, like, machines and stuff?”

“I built a radio one time,” Grace replied. “I’m pretty good at fixing stuff up.”

“And what about robots?” she pressed, fighting to be heard through the chatter of the others.

“Oh, yeah, I grew up with a Mr Handy around, I know how to fix up robots, mostly.”

“You think you can fix up a couple of ours?”

“Depends on how badly they’re broken, right?”

“Well," Red replied, "they’re about as broken as Timebomb’s clavicles, but if _he_ can get better…”

“Alright, take me to them. I’ll see what I can do.”

* * *

 

It was two o'clock in the morning by the time she finished with the Sentry Bots. There’d been a lot of nervous crying, messing around with code and searching frantically around Big Town for working parts, but when the two machines finally shuddered to life, Grace realised she maybe wasn’t so helpless after all. She sat on the community centre’s rooftop for an hour after that, eating mashed potatoes from a can, talking to O’Reilly about robots and extraterrestrial life, and just watching the robots glide around the streets. For a while, it seemed like nothing in the world could hurt them. She could pretend like yesterday had been a terrible nightmare, but she knew the truth.

Springvale had been her birthplace, her renaissance. It was dead-eyed hell on earth, all jagged edges that snagged on flesh and veins, nothing but footsteps that thumped in her head like a heartbeat, nothing but terror in her throat. Fairfax was fists and teeth and voices on repeat, it was a question above all else: could she survive, and what would she do to prove that she could? Carrington was a place built for leaving. It was smoking, burning, ungrateful hell and she  _ took  _ something from it and ran, and that was enough to answer Fairfax’s demands. Yes, she could survive out here, because already she’d done more than run away. She’d changed things, she’d taken things, she’d claimed this place in a short few hours, and Vault 106 was a final test: would you go back home now, if you could?

No - because she couldn’t, because the door was sealed and her name scratched off every register, to be spoken only in hushed voices, with wary eyes and questions no one dared answer. People back home would ask about Grace Arlyn in the same way children asked about the Vault door, away from nosy parents and tattling school kids, as far from the Overseer as steel walls would allow. She wouldn’t go home, because although she pined for it with everything in her, not once had she heard it call back _.  _ She wouldn’t go home, because for the first time in her entire life, she felt awake. She felt alive.

She wouldn’t go home, because she was already there.

“How can they go beep-boop in the most terrifying way possible?” Grace wondered. “I mean, the Mr Handy we had at home could  _ talk  _ and tell jokes and stuff. Those things are just spooky.”

“Dude,” O’Reilly said, “hit me with a robot joke and I’ll be your best friend.”

“Okay, okay,” she laughed. “Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says,  _ does this taste funny to you?” _ . 

O’Reilly groaned. “Vault robots, predicting day-to-day wasteland occurrences since 2077. Tell me another!”

“Two atoms are sitting in a bar. One says to the other,  _ I think I’ve lost an electron.  _ The other asks,  _ are you sure?  _ To which the first replies,  _ I’m positive.” _

“What’s an electron?”

She opened her mouth to reply. Froze. The sight in the distance made her blood chill in her veins. 

“I’ve got one more, real quick.”

“Can’t be any worse than those things crossing the bridge. Hit me.”

“War does not determine who is right. Only who is left.”

* * *

_ "And now the latest on that enigmatic Vault Martyr who stepped out of Vault 101 and into our hearts. And guess what, folks? I'm not talking about the old doctor James Arlyn. Turns out yet another 101 resident - or prisoner - has made it out into our humble wasteland. Who is she? Why did she leave? And why did she help Big Town fend off an incoming super mutant attack after less than twenty-four hours in the great outdoors? If you're listening out there, kid, I don't know what your fight is, but it sure is looking like a good one. Keep your eyes and ears out for this mysterious wanderer, open your arms, your doors, your hearts, if she needs it. It's not easy fighting the good fight out there. And the people fighting it, well... sometimes they just might need a hug. This is Three Dog over and out - for now." _


End file.
